Critics reviews

Set during the Nazi occupation of France, this caustic satire (1956) has had its admirers, including Francois Truffaut (who otherwise vilified its director, Claude Autant-Lara, as a "cinema of quality" hack). Comedian Andre Bourvil shows emotional range and excellent timing as an unemployed taxi driver turned black marketeer...

It's a beloved film at home while being virtually unknown elsewhere, and you might have to be French to get all of its gibes and contextual riffs, but the stars lock into a splenetic pas de deux (Gabin was rarely this energetic, especially at this age), and the teeming cast of combative schemers around them are a blast.

Although the odd-couple dynamic between Marcel and Grandgil is established immediately, it never exhausts itself, as Autant-Lara subtly uncovers new ways for the twosome's interplay to reveal underlying themes of class and privilege; the filmmaker further enhances the friendship's thematic implications with a third-act reveal that, like most of the film's surprises, was always there to begin with, but not meant to be taken seriously at first.

It's an actor's movie. The rapport is effective and the repartee is often hilarious. Gabin delivers a great rant in a bar where the men have stopped for a drink and attracted the suspicion of the owner and his regulars. Not only does he taunt the bemused patrons to take the suitcases from them by force but, in "Pig"'s most disquieting moment, outs the establishment's Jewish employee and accuses the owner of exploiting her.

Although comedic high jinks do ensue in Claude Autant-Lara's beloved-in-France postwar fable—namely a bit with a gathering parade of sow-sniffing hounds—the laughs it engenders get snarled in the throat... More than 50 years on, the film plays less like a classic than a still-festering wound—and is all the more valuable for it.