Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques (US: The Big Risk) balances drama and crime to create a highly rewarding noir experience with any trace of melodrama squeezed out for clinical results. Lino Ventura plays Abel Davos, a gangster desperate to enter France from Italy with his partner Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol), his wife Thérèse (Simone France), and their two little boys; his flight north by train, car, motorcycle, and boat in the middle of the night ends in tragedy and sends him on a desperate scramble for shelter and protection from his ungrateful criminal associates, who send a total stranger (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to pick him up. As usual, Ventura is simultaneously cold and vulnerable while Belmondo is the charming best friend we all wish we had; Sandra Milo plays Liliane, the young woman whom they pick up on their way to Paris and who becomes inextricably linked to the gangster’s fate.