French films of the 60s and 70s were adept at taking quintessentially American crime stories and putting them in a French setting – they invented the term for film noir, after all. Le Cercle Rouge feels like The Killing re-adapted for post-war France, with a heady dose of existential angst thrown in for good measure.
Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Gian Maria Volonte are career criminals from very different backgrounds out to pull-off an elaborate and seemingly impossible heist from a high-end jewelry store. On their trail is Commissaire Mattei (Andre Bourvil), as likable a police investigator as you’ll ever find in a heist film. The boys run afoul of underworld and police alike, sometimes via coincidence, sometimes via their own poor decision-making.
Like The Killing, the outcome of Le Cercle Rouge is almost a foregone conclusion, but it’s fascinating how they get there. The slow-burning story takes a great deal of time to set up our characters, playing with sympathies and the inevitable coincidences (or acts of fate) that bring the characters together. It also includes one of the tensest heist sequences ever committed to film – a good twenty minutes entirely without music or dialogue, as the plan unfolds before the audience. I honestly wanted to get up and applaud.
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