Becker’s genius in Touchez pas au grisbi is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.
Plot, finally, which abounds in Simonin’s novel, here becomes-at least until the final violent explosion-a chain of suggestive pauses. As for humor, it is everywhere and nowhere, a hard-bitten humor that seasons every conversation without ever suggesting anything like relaxed enjoyment.
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Exaggerated speech becomes a series of laconic exchanges, with the previously garrulous Max-Simonin’s endlessly talkative narrator-the tersest of all carefree promiscuity gives way to a mood of aging desire and violence is kept to a minimum, even though the threat of violence is everywhere.
The wise-guy, almost vaudevillian tone of the book gives way in the film to a clipped melancholy, unblinking and loaded with gravity. Crowded with incident, casually violent, narrated with a sort of comic grandiosity, it works its effects entirely through the power of an unleashed dialect, and the effect is something like a Gallic marriage of Damon Runyon and Mickey Spillane.īecker keeps the novel’s milieu and a good number of its characters-and changes just about everything else. Told in the first person by the aging career criminal Max le Menteur (played in the film by Jean Gabin), Simonin’s novel is an exuberant exercise in argot for its own sake and even comes with a glossary to help the reader wade through its impasto of criminal discourse. In fact Becker, with the help of Simonin, pretty much threw the book out the window.
Albert Simonin’s novel Touchez pas au grisbi is said to have had a revolutionary impact on French crime writing, and Jacques Becker’s film version had a similarly transformative effect on French crime films, yet film and novel bear little resemblance to each other.
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