Touchez pas au grisbi 1954

Howard Thompson, New York Times: The acting is consistently good. M. Gabin is, of course, an old hand at bland toughness. Rene Dary and Paul Frankeur, as two colleagues; Jeanne Moreau and Dora Doll, as two unlucky ladies, and Lino Ventura and Denise Clair... are sordidly convincing. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: It's Gabin's show all the way, anticipating the melancholy, atmospheric gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville that started to appear a couple years later. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: There's not a trace of vanity in [Gabin's] performance. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: Fifty years later, its trademark jukebox tune (a melancholy harmonica riff) still causes tingles, and its tough, laid-back elegance still seduces. Read more

Janice Page, Boston Globe: Every filmmaker from Francois Truffaut to Quentin Tarantino owes something of a debt to Becker's black-and-white boldness. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: A wonderful treasure from the seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of crackling French crime dramas. Read more

Jon Strickland, L.A. Weekly: A meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin. Read more

Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle: A classic policier. Read more

Time Out: This model French gangster picture set the rules for the great sequence of underworld movies from Jean-Pierre Melville that followed. Read more

Variety Staff, Variety: Jacques Becker, who did such a fine job in painting the turn-of-the-century apache milieu in Casque D'Or, brings the same care and psychological overtones to a film on the modern racketeer element. Read more