Not Delivered (1958) User Reviews (2)

The ball chase.

[dbdumonteil · 7/10 · 4 September 2005]

At my time of writing,"échec au porteur" has a very low rating.It's too bad:people who 'll give it a chance will not be disappointed.Gilles Grangier's fifties movies are almost all worthwhile.

Okay the gangsters side -with Gert "Goldfinger" Froebe- as the leader is conventional.But all that remains is original:first of all,Serge Reggiani,the star,disappears very early in the story.Then the hero becomes a ball(you read well) which contains a bomb which is to explode around 10PM.A child takes it,then he is sent to hospital( and he wants to keep his ball with him).Captain Paul "Diabolique" Meurisse has got to find back the thing.A lot of characters are involved including Jeanne Moreau as Régianni's love.

Recalls sometimes that Hitchcock short "Bang!You're dead!" where Bill()y Mumy played with a true revolver.

The last sequence,when the ball almost becomes a living thing,is worthy of a film noir master.

Decent French police procedural

[myriamlenys · 7/10 · 21 June 2019]

A young man has gotten himself tangled up with a nasty crowd of gangsters and drug dealers. At one point he finds himself carrying an average-looking football which - as he will discover later on - contains a bomb. By a sad coincidence, the young man runs into an exuberant group of playing boys, with the result that the football gets taken home by two unsuspecting children...

This black-and-white movie is a decent police procedural from the 1950's. It has an interesting plot but it suffers from a certain unevenness : the good or neutral characters tend to be realistic, while the evil characters seem to come straight out of a novel by Charles Dickens. (Watch Gert Fröbe ham it up as if pork was going out of business.) One can almost hear the director shouting : "Now I want you to be more picturesque ! Do you hear me, more picturesque ! And I want you to curse while limping ! Come on Gert, do you call that a twisted grin ? Now twist me that grin - and limp while cursing !"

I rather get the idea that the movie was used as a showcase for the latest technical advances in police equipment and forensic science. For instance, the public is expected to gasp with admiration at the lightning speed with which various police divisions can communicate. And the police has got tape recorders ! Oooh ! Tape recorders too !

Paul Meurisse makes an interesting police commissioner. I would have liked to see him continue the role in other movies.