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Rating: 
Summary: BEAUTIFUL MASTERPIECE
Review:
The great Jean Gabin is world weary, elegant, elder crime king pin Max in Jacques Becker's understated 1954 TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (Criterion).
The title literally translates "Hands off my loot!" But it's all about the details and relationships that are peripheral to the aftermath of big bullion heist that Max has just pulled off. His plan is to retire with his pretty young girlfriend, but when long time not so smart partner Riton brags to his two timing moll Josy (Jeanne Moreau), Max is sucked back into the world he helped create and can never leave.
Becker died in obscurity in 1960, but over time his reputation has grown. This once forgotten gem is now recognized as a near perfect touchstone of the crime genre and it looks brand new in pristine black and white.
Extras include interviews and essays and a TV documentary. It would be nice if the subtitles were in yellow, but that is a small complaint for a terrific film.
Rating:
Summary: Becker Gets His Due!
Review: A wonderful movie - romantic desolation, Gabin at his best.
Gripping, ironic, tragic - the film is more interested in its people than its plot. (Easy to see this as the work of a Renoir apprentice). But all the other reviewers below have covered all
that. The point is the disc: Criterion and Rialto continue to raise the bar for making old B&W 1:37 films look and sound great on disc. They start 2005 off with a bang on this one: pin-sharp, lovely contrast, a superb grain texture, the mono track rendered cleanly and clearly without brittleness. The extras - interviews and documentaries from French TV programs - are especially illuminating. A wonderful disc of an essential film.
It certainly bodes well for a great year from Criterion!
Rating:
Summary: French gangsters and Jean Gabin at their best
Review: Along with Rififi and Bob Le Flambour, Grisbi is a film no lover of crime flics should miss. The story is simple, Max ( Jean Gabin ) is an aging criminal who has just pulled off a robbery which will set him up in retirement. He knows that time is catching up with him and wishes himself out of the game. Unfortunatly he is stuck with a dim witted partner, Riton ( Rene Dary ) who thinks he carry on as he and Max did in their younger days.
Angelo ( Lino Ventura ) a rival gangster decides that he will cut himself into Max's grisbi (loot) and kidnaps Riton to get at him. Max then has to decide between keeping the loot and his loyalty to Riton and the underworld code of honour.
The great Jean Gabin is on top form as Max, he might to getting on, but this is still a guy you do not wish to mess with. Max might stick to the underworld code of honour but this does not stop him torturing a rival to find what he needs to know. In Max's world what matters is loyalty to your friends, everything else including the way you treat women, comes a distant second.
In this film we see why Max is a criminal. It is because he likes good suits, expensive restaurants, fine wine and beautiful women. Compare this to White Heat where Jimmy Cagney despite pulling off a series of robberies spends most of his time hiding out in cabins in the mountains.
Watch out for a young Jeanne Moreau as Riton's cheating girlfriend.
Rating: 
Summary: Exciting French gangster film with a magnetic Jean Gabin.
Review: Gabin is an aging gangster who has stolen gold bullion from Orly airport and wants to fence it so he can retire. But a rival gangster has other ideas and the rest of the tale deals with beaucoup double-cross, treachery and a final death-dealing confrontation. The Fox Lorber packaging is misleading--a very young Jeanne Moreau does not have a starring role, only a minor supporting one. However they have atoned for this by releasing a sharp, crystal clear print with new, highly visible sub-titles. Gabin is the star here giving a virile magnetic performance and showing why he was a top star in France for over four decades.
Rating:
Summary: The gangster film as ghost story of middle-age and loss.
Review: If there is one scene that explains the enduring appeal of 'Touchez Pas Au Grisbi' (basically 'don't touch the loot'), it is this: Max (Jean Gabin at his most Mitchum-esque), an aging hood who has pulled off a massive airport robbery and plans to retire quietly to the country, sits in his apartment one night with his old friend, the somewhat lunk-headed Riton (Rene Dary). Riton's girlfriend (Jeanne Moreau) has left him for a young gangster, Angelo (Lino Ventura in a sensational debut), whom she has informed of the job, and who is trying every means possible to snatch the gold. So this scene is of crucial generic urgency, with rippling consequences for the development of the plot. What Becker films is entirely without urgency or consequence. In complete silence, he follows the middle-aged men as they enter the apartment, sit down, prepare a light supper, eat and talk; Max then gets up, takes out mattresses and pillows for his friend's bed like a good chambermaid, undresses in the bathroom, brushes his teeth, Riton likewise; then they both go to bed. This beautifully understated, intimate and domestic scene does not replace the crime genre, but co-exists in paralell with it, showing what is at stake. This split defines the movie, from the conflict between older and younger characters (and men and women); between Max's affable respectability and his latent sadism; between bright interiors of oppressive theatrical artifice and dark outdoor locations; between static scenes where nothing much happens and jolting bursts of brutal violence and action. You even find it in the brilliant closing car chase, as thrilling location work intercuts with Hitchcock-style back projection. This disparity between the real and ideal gives the film its melancholic, philosophical heart, and gives the climax an over-powering force, set in the quiet countryside to which Max wished to retire, and which can only offer backdrop to a bloodbath. Critics have found in 'Grisbi', a gangster film about loyalty, treachery, collaboration, surveillance, torture, clandestine activities, secret hideouts, rural slaughter and military hardware, some kind of allegory for the Nazi Occupation of France a decade previously. This explanation is attractive because the period had been tacitly removed from the public sphere. But there is nothing so portentously grand in Becker's characteristically light handling. Max and the gangsters may well have been in the Resistance - Melville has said that underworld methods and contacts were vital to both Resistance and Gestapo - as their knowledge of torture techniques and gun-smuggling suggests. But the Resistance were absolutely crucial to their time and place, whereas Max and his friends are resolutely out of time, relics from the past who can only play at assimilation - the recurring motif of Max's harmonica theme suggests a man literally stuck in a groove. Max himself exists in a paralell world to the realities of a 1950s France nowhere to be seen on screen, a revenant infernally condemned to repeat mistakes and watch old friends die.
Rating:
Summary: Be Cool, kid.
Review: Jean Gabin plays Max, a gangster on his way out of the game, and they don't come much cooler. Max is something of a cross between Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra. This 1954 French film, whose complete title is loosely translated as "hands off the loot", is full of double breasted suits, girls with bright lipstick and short hair and hip dialogue heavily sprinkled with "daddy-o" and "lets split". Max is too old to be chasing the girls now and knows it - he just wants to go home to bed. His partner, looking like a French Clark Gable past his prime still has a weak will for the pretty showgirls and tries to put the impress on one by telling her that the Orly Airport gold heist was pulled by he and Max. Her real boyfriend soon gets the word and the struggle for the loot is on. Girls get slapped, guys heads are used to open closed doors and Colt .32 pistols are tucked in belts. However their isn't much "caper" to this crime flick and the action gun battles are somewhat amatuerish in the style of '50s American TV. It is easy to see however how this film influenced everything from "Oceans 11" to "Heat". So it is well worth a look, can you dig it? I knew that you could.
Rating:
Summary: Be Cool, kid.
Review: Jean Gabin plays Max, a gangster on his way out of the game, and they don't come much cooler. Max is something of a cross between Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra. This 1954 French film, whose complete title is loosely translated as "hands off the loot", is full of double breasted suits, girls with bright lipstick and short hair and hip dialogue heavily sprinkled with "daddy-o" and "lets split". Max is too old to be chasing the girls now and knows it - he just wants to go home to bed. His partner, looking like a French Clark Gable past his prime still has a weak will for the pretty showgirls and tries to put the impress on one by telling her that the Orly Airport gold heist was pulled by he and Max. Her real boyfriend soon gets the word and the struggle for the loot is on. Girls get slapped, guys heads are used to open closed doors and Colt .32 pistols are tucked in belts. However their isn't much "caper" to this crime flick and the action gun battles are somewhat amatuerish in the style of '50s American TV. It is easy to see however how this film influenced everything from "Oceans 11" to "Heat". So it is well worth a look, can you dig it? I knew that you could.
Rating:
Summary: "The Celler Is Better - No One Will Hear Him Scream."
Review: Like a fine wine, TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI has aged wonderfully. Under the expert and loving hands of the folks at Criterion, we have an absolutely pristine print of this understated and refined French gangster movie. Watching the Criterion DVD is to fall completely into the film, as the restored black and white images are simply glorious.
This movie is not like today's heavy-handed violent gangster movies, but a more elegant and sophisticated presentation that focuses on character development and its themes of loyalty, betrayal, and an adherence to a moral code. Jean Gabin, who plays the urbane and respected criminal Max, is the soul of this movie, presenting Max as charming, stoic, and ruthless. Great detail is given to ordinary tasks, like the serving of a meal, brushing of one's teeth, etc., but the effect, instead of arty, goes to the development of the characters and the portrayal of them as regular folks.
Lest you believe this is a slow talky picture, there are moments of explosive violence that will send a chill through you. Suspense is created through the most effective of methods: by what you don't see and what is filled in by one's own imagination. As the tension mounts in the movie, you will be glued to the screen gripping the arms of your chair with withering anticipation. They don't make 'em like this anymore, neither here nor in Europe. This movie is a fine example of both French cinema before the New Wave, and of the gangster genre.
In any language, TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI means film excellence, especially after the careful, painstaking restoration by Criterion Studios.
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