Lino Ventura shares with Lee Marvin the quality of looking hard, mean and cool at one and the same time so that he is totally believable as a professional hit-man. This is not quite the same quality that Robert Ryan or Richard Widmark project which is more meanness and both can crumble when the chips are down whereas it's difficult to think of Ventura breaking down like a schoolyard bully when someone stands up to them. Jose Giovanni is in the news again among film buffs by virtue of the fact that a novel of his, Le Deuxiems Soufflé, already adapted in the 60s by Jean-Pierre Melville into an outstanding polar has just been remade by Alain Corneau. This film opens and closes on Ventura and in one sense promises more than it delivers given that there is very little action until the last couple of reels, what we get instead is dialogue spiced with dime-store philosophy yet through it all we keep watching. Not a masterpiece but not chopped liver either.
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writers_reign17 December 2007
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dbdumonteil2 August 2006I have always thought that José Giovanni's early efforts ("La Loi du Survivant" "Dernier Domicile Connu" "Deux Hommes dans la Ville ") were his best.His heroes were jaded men,whose fight was lost before the story began.
Take "Dernier Domicile Connu" :Lino Ventura and Marlene Jobert play two cops;the woman is a rookie full of illusions whereas the older cop has lost all his ones .
The precedent movie "Le Rapace" pits an idealist,Chico,against a mercenary (Ventura) in an imaginary South America dictatorship.The splendid cinematography ,a sense of exoticism and above all,François de Roubaix's marvelous score (and song in Spanish) makes this film an admirable adventures movie ,to rival the best of John Huston. -
silverauk13 January 2003José Giovanni, famous for his adventure and crimi movies (Deux Hommes dans la Ville (1973)) is also a good script-writer (he wrote the script of Le Clan des Siciliens (1969)). This movie based on the novel by John Carrick, shows us the killer Le Rital (Lino Ventura) who has to kill the president of a South-American country. He received his mission by a lawyer, a certain Chavez. His commissioners all look to be partisans for the revolution but Le Rital is not trusting anyone and after the cold-blooded murder of the president he will have a lot of trouble to fly out of the country. His dialogues with an idealistic revolutionary, Chico, are interesting because they determine the motivation for each one to commit this murder. Le Rital says: "with this money I can have any woman I want". At another occasion he prohibits Chico to follow him, saying: "I will end up at the end of a rope". At the end we are not sure of what is going to happen at last: will he be shot by the troops of general Alguirez? The action in the movie is quite realistic but one has to bee a good shooter to kill a moving person at more than two hundred yards. Le Rital is a professional and he and his rifle are one, he is the man who never misses. Lino Ventura is the right cast for this somewhat underestimated movie.
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searchanddestroy-114 February 2021I know this movie since my childhood and I just discovered it, with another glance. I like this film, an adventure yarn with no love interest and a deep character study, with no good nor evil guys, only grey characters. Lino Ventura plays here a rough and so shaded character. The checkers scene is very useful to understand both rivalry between the killer and the Mexican. By the way El Bosco character actor will be used four years later by Jose Giovanni in LA SCOUMOUNE, as the Jean Paul Belmondo's sidekick. This Mexican actor's role is interesting mainly thanks to the presence of his little monkey friend. Unusual.