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The films of Claude Sautet defied the New Wave fraternity Classe tous risques(1960). | Mubi

When the French crime film Classe tous risques—the English title, The Big Risk, fails to capture the pun on insurance policies and travel accommodations—premiered in Paris in March 1960, it was undercut by no less a modern heretic than Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathlesshad premiered only a week before. Both films starred Jean-Paul Belmondo, an ex-boxer whose hardscrabble looks were belied by his soft pout. He plays underworld citizens in both films: In Breathless, the scapegrace Michel Poiccard, stroking his thumb across his lips in a pastiche of Humphrey Bogart, and in Classe tous risques a young louche named éric Stark. The film’s director, Claude Sautet, was thirty-six at the time, having apprenticed for years as an assistant director of middling, prefab projects—George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), which Sautet cowrote, being a key exception. Sautet is mostly an unknown quantity in anglophone circles and Classe tous risquesis probably his most recognizable achievement thanks to the Criterion Collection, which gave it one of its comprehensive DVD treatments in 2008.

Based on the série noire by ex-con José Giovanni (who spent a year on death row for his involvement in a triple murder), Classe tous risquesconcerns fugitive mob boss Abel Davos, who returns home to France after years of Italian exile. Played tersely by leading man Lino Ventura, Davos completes a harrowing getaway to southern France with his two sons in tow, at which point he puts out a call to his old goombahs to arrange a clandestine passage for him to Paris. But his accomplices are older now, too integrated into the social fabric to take the risk. So they enlist a cat’s paw to go in their stead, Belmondo’s éric Stark, who will end up offering Davos unconditional loyalty. The film is an embittered distillation of the familiar gangland code “honor among thieves.”

Most accounts of the initial neglect of Classe tous risquesposit that Breathlesshad simply upstaged it; the insurgency of the New Wave rendered works that fell outside its ambit irrelevant. In contrast to Godard’s baptism by film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma—where other New Wave fillmmakers like Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette had also cut their teeth—Sautet had come up through the national film school. The straightforward Classe tous risquescouldn’t help but be perceived as passé, what with its unironic posture and appointment of an old hand like Ventura. Truffaut, who vilified the postwar mainstream French cinema as “Le Cinéma de Papa” quipped, “Sautet has no class, and he takes no risks, period.” (Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.) The magazine would maintain this frosty stance with him, as if toeing a party line, but, for his part, Sautet grew thicker skin. “I’m not about to spend countless sleepless nights trying to figure out the thousand-and-one reasons why they were allergic to me,” Sautet told Michel Boujut in 1994 for Conversations avec Claude Sautet.“It’s their business, and I can’t do anything for them.” 

In fact, Classe tous risquesbeat Breathlessat the Paris box office opening week. But timing and momentum was on Godard’s side. Classe tous risqueswould disappear from Paris theaters after only three weeks. In the United States, the film, according to J. Hoberman, was “dubbed, dumped, and unreviewed upon its 1963 U.S. release.” Classe tous risques would not have a meaningful theatrical run in the country until the mid 2000s. But it was not without its diehard supporters. A young Bertrand Tavernier, who would go on to become one of the most important filmmakers of the post-New Wave generation, championed it, with all the glibness of youth, calling it “a B-movie, but a B like [Budd] Boetticher rather than an A like [Yves] Allégret.” Robert Bresson was said to have admired its rigor and authenticity. But there was one admirer that stood out from the rest, one whom no one could accuse of na?veté: the face of French noir, Jean-Pierre Melville.

Known for the ascetic and morally turbulent polars and policiers he made from 1966 to 1972, Melville was a true, if tad eccentric, movie maverick, even endeared to the New Wave fraternity. Melville’s first feature, the Occupation-era chamber pieceLe silence de la mer (1949), was made in defiance of the sclerotic French film establishment at a time when even the notion of independent filmmaking did not exist. A few years later, in line with his punk ethos, Melville built his own studio in a rundown section of Paris, giving him the leeway to be as fastidious as possible on his projects without interference. “Auteur” could not quite encompass what he did; he preferred the term “Creator.” The New Wave took notes. “We could never have made the films that we made if it hadn’t been for Melville,” Chabrol once wrote.

As the New Wave began to shape the zeitgeist, Melville strove to distance himself from his cherished cénacle, calling his acolytes “a small chapel of crazy cinéphiles.” The elder statesman was more amenable to Sautet precisely because he was not part of the New Wave rank-and-file. In a 1962 edition of the film magazine Presence du Cinema, Melville heaped one hosanna after another on the greenhorn director. If the New Wave was nothing more than an insolent youth movement of “snobbish attitudes imposed by the patrons of the latest shindig,” Sautet, “this young man, full of maturity,” evinced all the qualities they lacked: modesty, patience, and tact. For good measure, Melville threw in a bold prediction. “If I’m certain that Claude Sautet will be our greatest filmmaker by 1965, it’s because, apart from his talent, I know him to be in possession of an unflappable courage.” If the hyperbole verged on overkill, Melville’s opinion of Classe tous risqueswas genuine. At a screening of the film on the outskirts of Paris, Sautet spotted the director with his conspicuous white Stetson in the audience. “At the end of the screening,” Sautet told Boujut, “when [the audience] started to ask me questions, [Melville] got up and responded in my place and did it better than I could ever know to do!”

Classe tous risquescomprises two clear-cut halves. The first, a startling daylight heist on a Milan street thronged with pedestrians (shot with such neorealist verve that a few brazen passersby hotfooted after the fleeing actors, thinking they were actual bandits), followed by a high-speed chase, and a tragic shootout on the beach. In the second, the film becomes, in a hint of what is to come in Sautet’s later works, a doleful character study of Davos as a wounded bear on the edge of death. The only person he can trust is Stark, the hired hand.

In his encomium on Sautet, Melville was struck by the economy of speech in those scenes between Davos and Stark, especially given what he felt to be the logorrhea in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. “I absolutely believe in the friendship between Abel Davos and Stark,” Melville wrote. Melville abided by a similarly spare aesthetic in his self-described “anti-cinematographic” debut, Le silence de la mer.If he was not much of an accurate prognosticator of film culture at large, Melville had a better idea of where his own craft would take him. After L’a?né des Ferchaux (1963), Melville took a few years off from working on another film. He called this time his “years in the wilderness,” an opportunity to “purify” himself. But of what exactly?

Up until 1964, many of Melville’s films could be characterized by their verbosity or freewheeling style. In Bob le flambeur(1956), Deux hommes dans Manhattan (1959), and L’a?né des Ferchaux, the form is loose, picaresque. But in 1966, he returned with one of his most ambitious noirs, Le deuxième souffle. This marked the beginning of a string of self-consciously commercial vehicles, until his death from a heart attack in 1973, that were unusual for their intense austerity. Classe tous risques, however tacit, may have helped clarify for Melville the direction he would wind up pursuing—towards, in his own words, “absolute classicism.”

Le deuxième souffle, also an adaptation from a José Giovanni novel, features Ventura in a near-identical role, a jailbird on the lam. Like Davos, Gustave Minda spends much of the film brooding on his uncertain future in one hideout after another. Ventura would reprise this solitary character in Melville’s Resistance epic, Army of Shadows (1969). Echoes of the unspoken bond between Davos and Stark are tangible in Le cercle rouge’s near-wordless, intimate camaraderie between ad hoc accomplices Alain Delon and Gian Maria Volontè, doomed, like all the men in Melville’s bleak universe, to die alone.

Sautet, of course, never did become France’s “greatest filmmaker.” But by 2000, the year Sautet died from liver cancer, he was at least one of its most underrated. While terra incognita outside of France, his work is substantial enough in his homeland to merit the recognition this past year of the centenary of his birth, an occasion marked by screenings of his films and retrospective writeups in the press. Admittedly, Sautet’s career was something of a mixed bag. Five years after his lukewarm Classe tous risques, Sautet returned withThe Dictator’s Guns(1965), another hardboiled venture featuring Lino Ventura that plays out like a spin-off of certain Hollywood nautical noirs, say, To Have and Have Not or Key Largo. It underwhelmed on all fronts, compelling Sautet to take another step back from directing. He stayed busy as an aide-to-camp to various film projects—he cowrote the blockbuster caper Borsalino—while establishing himself as one of the most in-demand script doctors in the industry.

If Sautet’s reputation in the 1960s was as a gallicized Don Siegel, he would make a drastic about-face in 1970 with his third feature, Les Choses de la vie, a drama that takes place not in the community of brutes and toughs but in the professional-managerial classes of a glum architect, reeling from a midlife crisis. Starring two of the biggest French stars of the day in Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, both of whom would become Sautet stalwarts (the first of five films for Piccoli and the first of five for Schneider), Les Choses de la viehit pay dirt and set the terms on which a “Sautet film” would look like henceforth: naturalist character studies of upper middle-class, middle-aged men and women wading through a season of discontent, anchored by big names (Yves Montand in the first half of Sautet’s career and later Emmanuelle Béart). Sautet at times seems less interested in telling a story than observing his characters. The mise-en-scène is unobtrusive, classical, as in Howard Hawks and John Ford, two masters dear to Sautet. These films had few traces of the American B-movie that informed his first two, borrowing instead from the sorrow and mirth of Italian comedy. But there was no mistaking in these films a distinctly homegrown quality. Truffaut would later say of Sautet that he is “Fran?ais, Fran?ais, Fran?ais.”

Such absorption in the quotidian affairs of the beautiful and the damned would make Sautet the de facto chronicler of the French bourgeoisie (haute and petite) of the 1970s, France’s own Age of Anxiety. To the extent that Sautet’s characters were all dead-enders nursing some private failure, it is hard not to perceive the general tenor of that “pompidolo-giscardienne” decade, in which France, hungover from the disenchanting fallout of May 1968 and beset by a sluggish economy and rising unemployment, struggled to see itself clearly in the haze. Sautet, who had been briefly a member of the Communist Party and worked at a center for juvenile delinquents, was sensitive to these material changes. “Behind the trips in cars, lunches in cafés, you can feel the cracks, the disappearance of a certain France that had emerged from the Occupation and liberation,” said Tavernier, one of Sautet’s most passionate defenders. But it bothered Sautet to find himself always being described in clinical terms, as a sociologist of upper class social milieus, as if the art was ancillary. A trained painter and sculptor in his youth, Sautet viewed himself as a committed portraitist.     

Success was not without its costs. Just as he found his footing, Sautet became a bugbear of critics and cognoscenti, who, in the wake of the social tumult of the 1960s, excoriated him for what they felt to be his all-too-cozy endorsement of the upper middle class. Not enough kitchen sink in his realism. These were, after all, the years of the Dziga Vertov Group and the Maoist turn of Cahiers du Cinéma. For those whom L’enfant secretand La maman et la putainwere sacred touchstones of the 1970s, Sautet could only be regarded with rank suspicion. “The world of Sautet is not only small, there is no ‘outside,’” Serge Daney wrote in Libération. “How do you create stories in a world that only aspires to retirement and dreams only of conforming?” In a pan of one of Sautet’s top hits of the era, Vincent, Fran?ois, Paul . . . et les autres (1974), the cantankerous John Simon dubbed it “upper-middlebrow soap opera, or, if you prefer, commercialism with a touch of class.” Positif, a rival film magazine to Cahiers du Cinemaand which supported Sautet throughout his career, suggested that “middle-class intimists” like Sautet were pilloried because they were focused on “showing [viewers] what was, not what should have been.”

Ensconcing themselves in cafés and brasseries, chainsmoking and gourmandizing through the ruts they found themselves in, Sautet’s saturnine men and women, if vulnerable to ridicule, were nevertheless honest expressions of Sautet’s own upbringing. His father, a WWI veteran, struggled to hold down a job (and apparently went through thirty-six of them) before landing on his feet as a manager of a Paris bistro across from Montparnasse cemetery. You could not accuse Sautet of bad faith. “I always begin with my characters,” Sautet told Boujut. “Characters that come to me from my childhood or from encounters at different points in my life. It’s the petit-bourgeois melting pot that continues to nourish my films. People who have become socially, economically, intellectually astray. I can only deal with what I feel is in my roots.”

For all the rebuke he received, Sautet never forgot that he was working in a commercial medium, that he was making mature films to be seen widely by mature people. Even then his impulse was not necessarily to please or placate his viewers. He had an aversion to tidy endings, preferring them to be off-key, discordant. For years Hollywood was keen on remaking César et Rosalie, his lyrical riff on a love triangle gone awry, but the studio suits could never come to terms with its ambiguous finale. In the end, they let their option lapse. 

After a patchy stint in the 1980s, Sautet would emerge in the new decade with two of his best-received works, Un c?ur en hiver(1992) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995). Sautet benefited from a change of pace, replacing his longtime scriptwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie with the younger Jacques Fieschi and aligning himself with a new generation of actors, most notably Daniel Auteuil, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Emmanuelle Béart. But not everything was overhauled. In Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud,a familiar figure from Sautet’s thematic constellation appears in the well-heeled, patrician Pierre Arnaud (Michel Serrault), a retired judge who one day hires the beautiful, debt-saddled literary editor Nelly (Béart), forty years his junior, to help him write his memoirs. Never sexual but never totally platonic, their relationship skirts romantic love, skittishly present on the surface. 

Observers noted that Serrault’s Arnaud seemed a virtual facsimile of the director himself, both white-haired septuagenarians with reserved temperaments. But the archetype of Arnaud is one that Sautet had been refining for decades since Classe tous risques, with Lino Ventura—even dating back to the aging gangsters depicted so ruefully by Jean Gabin in films like Pépé le Moko and Jean Servais in Rififi. But of all those overripe sharpies it is perhaps Bob Montagné, the rakish, silver-haired highflier of the Montmartre demimonde in Melville’s Bob le flambeur, who comes most immediately to mind. In Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud, when Arnaud finds himself fixating on a slumbering, topless Nelly in the small hours, it conjures up the same moment in Bob le flambeur when Montagné returns home late to find his protégé fast asleep with a young woman. For a moment, a dark shadow passes over Montagné‘s face, not because he disapproves but because he is reminded, like Arnaud during his melancholic trance, that loneliness can be a terrible, irrevocable thing.