Mise à Sac unbagged

This is HUGE!

I just took my honeymoon in New York (exactly two months ago) and happened to hit MOMA. Too bad the timing wasn’t better.

I feel lucky to have seen this one this weekend. There was a guy from Cinémathèque française who introduced the film and said it was financed by United Artists and he isn’t sure why they chose to not bring it to the US since they are an American company. Here are a few of my impressions:

~ The guy who introduced the movie didn’t mention Westlake at all. He talked only of how it was written as a collaboration between Cavalier and Sautet.

~ The movie was a much more straight forward telling of the novel than I expected. Especially judging from the fact that it’s set in France and the image on MOMA’s promotional material doesn’t resemble anything that happened in the novel. It also wasn’t particularly avant-garde at all beyond some dischordant jazz music in the open and closing credits. It was a straight heist movie.

~ Michel Constantin (the actor that played the Parker character) looked good. Better looking and darker hair, but big and rangy and tough looking. He wore a single dark suit the whole film. Unfortunately he wasn’t quite the same personality wise. He occassionally cracked a smile or joked around with the other guys in the crew. You get a taste of the softer tone right away – the movie starts with the guy tailing him and instead of killing him with a blow to the windpipe he drags him along to the meeting.

~ Almost the entire movie took place during the heist. The setup and getaway taking relatively little time.

~ The most substantial difference was the end of the movie. They cut out the whole scene where they holed up to wait for heat to die down. Instead when Edgar goes off plan, the whole heist goes haywire and there is a mad unplanned dash to escape the police in the early dawn. This probably worked better with the pacing of the movie and kept the focus on the actual work of the heist.

~ Despite what was previously reported on this site, Parker is not caught in the end. Most of the crew is caught but Parker does escape – albeit with none of the money from the job.

~ A surprisingly delightful amount of time was spent on the mechanics of the heist: how the bank vaults are opened, how various things are timed, etc. I could see this being criticized by critics if this film were to get wide release today because the actual characters are given short shrift in the film – you get the names of the guys and that’s it. A buddy I was with swears that the initials they were addressing each other with over the walkie talkies were inconsistent. He thought the problem was with the subtitles. But I can’t confirm or deny that, I could nto keep the entire crew straight from each other. This was not “Ocean’s 11” where every character is given a ridiculous outsized personality.

~ A bright spot in the movie was Irène Tunc, the woman working at the telephone switchboard operator who ends up leaving with the crew. Unlike the novel she doesn’t go willingly, but is dragged along after she identifies Edgar by his voice over the walkie talkie. She had real spunk and nuance for a limited role.

~ The scene where the kid wakes up at his girlfriend’s at 2AM, stumbles across the the bank robbery in progress, and calls the police from the phone booth across the street was almost exactly the same as the novel, and it got a big laugh. When the police car pulled up and the two robbers get out with their ski masks on the poor kid can’t believe his luck.