There’s a scene in Alex Joffé’s Du rififi chez les femmes (US: Riff Raff Girls) — in which a female gangster arrives at her hated rival’s nightclub, pulls a gun on her, and deploys her army of a dozen gorgeous, well-dressed gangster girls to destroy the place with baseball bats — that perfectly exemplifies the film’s overall tone, an entertaining friction between dark violence and outrageous hijinks that failed to impress critics upon its release. Based on a novel by popular French author Auguste le Breton, who also penned the source novels for Rififi and Razzia (both 1955), among others, and co-scripted by José Giovanni, who also wrote Le trou and The Big Risk (both 1960), among others, the film is set in Brussels and combines a gritty gangster story with an elaborate heist story, unusual in the noir cycle for its prevalence of female criminals who possess power beyond the sexy wiles of a femme fatale. The stunning Nadja Tiller stars as Vicky de Berlin, whose counterfeiting syndicate operates from her floating nightclub, Ration K, and is managed by her partner and lover Marcel Point-Bleu (Robert Hossein), who takes a job on a construction site with the goal of breaking in to the Bank of Belgium and swapping its legal tender with fake bills. The heist plans are threatened by a greedy crime syndicate run by The Bug (Roger Hanin) and his number two, Yoko (Silvia Monfort), who are determined to annex Vicky’s business as part of their own. Popular American expat Eddie Constantine plays Interpol agent Williams in a role barely bigger than a cameo. Bathed in noir lighting and occasionally veering toward an aesthetic of French poetic realism, the film’s final act is a crescendo of betrayal and action with an enormous body count, culminating in one of noir’s most perfectly bleak final images: a neon light slowly flashing in the foreground as half a dozen corpses lie in a dark cobblestone alley behind a wrought-iron gate.