Action Man

Jean Gabin has three or four good businesses, he's married to beautiful authoress Suzanne Fion, he gets to slap around the waiter who tries to turn his restaurant into a cocaine pitch and he's bored. He plans a robbery of the bank across from his bar -- they've got a half-billion-franc payroll every month, like clockwork -- but doesn't really expect to do anything about it until his old buddy, Robert Stack shows up out of nowhere.

The movie has a beautiful set-piece robbery, Gabin slaps around several people and there is plenty of sadism and treachery, yet I found the movie to be good, but not the great fun I had expected. Perhaps I had gone in expecting too much, but Gabin is too old to play the virile action hero, so he's the brains of the operation, and Stack is the brawn. And Stack is never brutal or commanding or anything more than Gabin's efficient sidekick, his loyal dog, who has been looking for Gabin since he disappeared from Indo-China in 1954.

It's understandable, because it's Gabin, but it means that there's little depth to it. It's just a well-run caper film running along its clockwork mechanisms. that's a lot of fun, but nothing more.