Le Gros Coup

Featuring a bizarre love triangle that moves from home invasion to blackmailing to kidnapping to murder, Jean Valère’s Le Gros Coup possesses an unmistakable French New Wave quality certainly reinforced by the presence of Emmanuelle Riva, who had starred in a seminal New Wave work five years earlier, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). A relatively unknown name in French crime cinema, Valère may have been inspired by the early films of Claude Chabrol (À double tour, 1959; The Third Lover, 1962) in creating this under-appreciated gem, its stylistics spanning location shooting, mirror reflections, unusual compositions, etc. Hardy Krüger plays soccer player Frank Willes, whose career ends prematurely when he survives a head-on collision which kills the other driver, a wealthy businessman. When he learns that the accident might have been a set-up arranged by the dead man’s beautiful wife Clémence Grandval (Riva) and her lover Michel Arland (Francisco Rabal), Willes seizes the opportunity to profit off this knowledge, beginning with visiting Clémence and planting a tape recorder in her sofa (some may note a similarity between their first encounter and Walter Neff’s introduction to Phyllis Dietrichson in 1944’s Double Indemnity). A deadly game of cat and mouse ensues in the form of a strange “romance” between Willes and Clémence, but the rules of the game will change without warning more than once. The ugliness of postwar modernity is not so subtly emphasized: note the ultramodern suburban home concealing a kidnapped man handcuffed to a bed.