La Rumba (1987)
Directed by Roger Hanin

Film Review

After his pessimistic racially themed drama Train d'enfer (1984), director Roger Hanin indulged himself with this full-blooded homage to the gangster movie of the 1930s. Classic films such as Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) may have been a strong influence on both the plot and the film's design, to say nothing of its gratuitous bursts of violence. More recent French films, such as Jacques Deray's Borsalino (1970), seem tame by comparison. However, rather like Alexandre Arcady's Le Grand pardon (1982), in which Hanin had recently starred, there doesn't seem to be much beneath the film's surface gloss. With its glitzy production values and relentless jazz score, La Rumba is as vibrant a depiction of 1930s gangsterism as you can imagine, but compared, say, with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) or Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), it's a pretty vacuous spectacle of violence for its own sake, almost totally lacking in dramatic impact, despite the presence of such illustrious actors as Michel Piccoli and Niels Arestrup. Characters are little more than stock archetypes and the plot, what there is of it, looks like a last minute addition, just to give the protagonists the thinnest of pretexts for killing each other. Still, it's probably worth watching for Guy Marchand's rendition of that old musical hall number, Le Chapeau de Zozo.

Film Synopsis

In 1938, Beppo Manzoni is one of the kings of the Parisian underworld, thanks to his large network of casinos and nightclubs.  An Italian living in exile, he has nothing but contempt for Fascism and gladly agrees to offer a safe haven in Paris to three fugitives of Mussolini's regime.  These are the singer Regina and the Toselli brothers, all of whom have been condemned to death by the authorities in Italy.  Police superintendent Detaix, an active member of the French pro-Fascist group La Cagoule, is on the trail of the three fugitives, determined that these subversives should not escape their sentence.  Manzoni makes a show of willing to help Detaix, but he misleads him with false information.  Meanwhile, the Toselli brothers manage to lay their hands on a death list containing the names of twenty-five prominent French people.  Realising that this is dynamite for his anti-Fascist cause, Manzoni goes on the offensive and is soon locked in a fierce battle to the death with his enemy Detaix...