Claude Sautet’s influential crime drama, starring Lino Ventura as an on-the-run former mob boss who tries to smuggle his family back into France with the help of loyal new friend Jean-Paul Belmondo, is so character driven that it was said to have been a major influence on Melville and his famous gangster character studies of the ’60’s, despite getting buried at the cinema by the just bursting New Wave. Ventura is Abel Davos, a guy with a lot of former connections, all who hardly want to risk their comfortable lives importing a dangerous felon, but young Eric Stark (Belmondo, almost simultaneously becoming a super-star in “Breathless”) knows class when he sees it and risks his life getting Abel to Paris to enact revenge on those unwilling to help. If that sounds Melvillian, it is, right down to the leading stars, who would both prove essential to Melville in the coming years, but where the characters and actors may point to Melville’s later classics, Sautet’s style is less structured, utilizing an almost entirely on location shooting grid for a more naturalistic feel. Big props once again to Criterion for presenting a little known French classic with a fine bonus section of documentaries on first time director Sautet and novelist Jose Giovanni, who in a short span, was the author of “Le Trou”, “Classe Tous Risques” and “Le Deuxiemme Souffle”, three of France’s best genre films.