Claude Sautet

Classe tous risques

Classe tous risques

After hiding out in Milan for nearly a decade, fugitive gangland chief Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) sneaks back to Paris with his children despite a death sentence hanging over his head. Accompanied by appointed guardian Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo, fresh off his star turn in Breathless) and beset by backstabbing former friends, Abel begins a journey through the postwar Parisian underworld that's both throat grabbing and soul searching. A character study of a career criminal at the end of his rope, this rugged noir from Claude Sautet (Un coeur en hiver) is a thrilling highlight of sixties French cinema.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1960
  • 108 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #434

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer
  • Excerpts from Claude Sautet ou la magie invisible, a 2003 documentary on the director by writers N. T. Binh and Dominique Rabourdin
  • Interview with Classe tous risques novelist and screenwriter José Giovanni
  • Archival interview footage featuring actor Lino Ventura discussing his career
  • Original French and U.S. release trailers
  • PLUS: New essays by director Bertrand Tavernier and Binh, a reprinted interview with Sautet, and a 1962 tribute by Jean-Pierre Melville

    New cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer
  • Excerpts from Claude Sautet ou la magie invisible, a 2003 documentary on the director by writers N. T. Binh and Dominique Rabourdin
  • Interview with Classe tous risques novelist and screenwriter José Giovanni
  • Archival interview footage featuring actor Lino Ventura discussing his career
  • Original French and U.S. release trailers
  • PLUS: New essays by director Bertrand Tavernier and Binh, a reprinted interview with Sautet, and a 1962 tribute by Jean-Pierre Melville

    New cover by Eric Skillman
Classe tous risques
Cast
Lino Ventura
Abel Davos
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Eric Stark
Sandra Milo
Liliane
Marcel Dalio
Arthur Gibelin
Michel Ardan
Riton Vintran
Claude Cerval
Raoul Fargier
Credits
Director
Claude Sautet
Based on the novel by
José Giovanni
Adaptation by
Claude Sautet
Adaptation by
José Giovanni
Adaptation by
Pascal Jardin
Dialogue
José Giovanni
Music
Georges Delerue
Cinematography
Ghislain Cloquet
Sets
Rino Mondelini
Sound
Jacques Lébreton
Editing
Albert Jurgenson

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Jean-Paul Belmondo

Actor

Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo

When you’re talking about French New Wave cool, it’s Jean-Paul Belmondo who first comes to mind. There are other male icons of the era—Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud—but with his casual sexiness, cigarette-smoking swagger, and boxer’s mug that only a mother (or actually, as it turns out, everyone) could love, Belmondo stands alone. The son of a famous sculptor, he worked successfully as a comic stage actor for a few years before Jean-Luc Godard cast him in his 1958 short Charlotte et son Jules; during the production, Godard promised the young actor the lead role in his first film. In 1960, Breathless hit: its impact was, of course, seismic, and so was the force of the actor’s breakthrough. In Michel Poiccard, Belmondo created a rapscallion antihero for the ages, couched by Jean-Luc Godard in both romanticism and reality, as though a demigod in a documentary. Superstardom followed fast on the film’s heels. In the early sixties, Belmondo would alternate between New Wave art films (working with Godard again in A Woman Is a Woman and Pierrot le fou) and gangster pictures that showed off his effortless tough-guy bravado (Classe tous risques, Le doulos). Soon enough, he was one of France’s most bankable stars, embarking on a career making comedies and action movies that has already spanned a half century and is still going on.