Échec au porteur (1958)
Directed by Gilles Grangier

Film Review

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Gilles Grangier directed a number of noir-style thrillers that range from the inspired - Gas-oil (1955), 125, rue Montmartre (1959) - to the mundane and painfully derivative - Trois jours à vivre (1958), Maigret voit rouge (1963).  Échec au porteur falls between these two extremes and, whilst it is hardly Grangier's best work, it is interesting because it makes an attempt to progress beyond the bog-standard formulaic French policier of this time and move in the direction of the modern police procedural drama that would become its natural successor in the following decade.  The location scenes shot on some waste ground outside the city look like an obvious nod towards the Italian neo-realists and it is apparent that Grangier is striving to give his thriller a more realist edge, amidst all the casually recycled noir motifs.

This might also explain another pecularity of the film. Even though it features some incredibly starry actors - Paul Meurisse, Gert Fröbe, Jeanne Moreau, Serge Reggiani - most of these barely have more than a minor role in the proceedings and equal prominence is given to far lesser known (and far less capable) actors in more ample roles.  Like many of his old school contemporaries (Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, Jean Delannoy, Claude Autant-Lara), Grangier appears to have suddenly taken stock of the complacency that had crept into French cinema in the 1950s and is now suddenly doing his best to move things forwards - ahead of the arrival of the French New Wave.

Échec au porteur's main shortcoming is a far-fetched plot which (taken from a novel by Noël Calef) totally fails to convince.  With contrivance built upon contrivance, the insultingly pedestrian narrative has lost just about every scrap of credibility it has by the mid-point, and thereafter Grangier is fighting a losing battle to maintain our interest.  Hitchcock would doubtless have had great fun with the film's suspense element, but Grangier (helped by his totally inept screenwriters) makes a meal of this and merely serves up tedium in its place.  The pace flags, the characters become nothing more than feeble archetypes (some of the acting is atrocious), and you'd be forgiven for giving up on it way before the all-too predictable pay-off.  Everything about the film is second-rate, B-movie trash, and yet somehow Grangier prevents it from being a total disaster.

Reggiani appears only in the first half of the film, but his presence alone is enough to give the film a reality that many comparable French thrillers of this time lacked.  Fröbe's natural aura of menace comes with a touch of cartoonish villainy that anticipates the actor's most famous role (as the best Bond villain of them all in Goldfinger).  Best of all, Meurisse (taking over from Reggiani at the mid-point) is as convincing as ever in the role he was best suited for, that of the driven, never-say-die cop.  The presence of such fine actors as these (Moreau barely gets a look in), together with a suitably tense and dramatic shoot out at the film's grim climax, redeem what would otherwise have been another botched policier.

Film Synopsis

Bastien Sassey has grown weary of his criminal life and intends making a fresh start with his girlfriend Jacqueline.  For the past few years, he has found himself a steady income by working as a courier for a gang of drugs traffickers, but now all he wants is to lead an honest life with the girl he loves.  Before he can do so, however, he needs some money to get started, and this he plans to obtain by taking on one last job.  On this occasion, he betrays his usual employer by offering his services to a rival gang led by Hans.

Bastien collects the consignment of drugs, which are, as usual, concealed in a football, and proceeds with the delivery.  What he doesn't know is that instead of drugs, Hans has placed inside the ball a time bomb which is due to go off in ten hours' time.  Happy that his life of crime is finally drawing to a close, Bastien makes his way across town and unwittingly gets the football mixed up with another one when he runs into a gang of boys playing on a patch of waste ground.  When this mix-up is relayed back to Hans he is furious and immediately sends his right-hand man Dédé to kill the troublesome Bastien.

Bastien is naturally horrified when it dawns on him that the ball he was due to deliver contains a bomb and is now being kicked around nonchalantly by a gang of children.  Before he dies from his gunshot wounds, he manages to get a warning to the police, who immediately swing into action and start scouring the town for the deadly football.  Superintendent Varzeilles takes charge of the search but despite his best efforts the location of the ball remains a mystery.  No one knows that the ball is in the possession of a boy who has just gone down with acute appendicitis.  Unable to part with the ball, little Giraucourt insists on taking it with him when he is admitted into hospital...