Event

The Hole @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Jacques Becker, 1960, 132 min., B&W, new restoration, DCP projection source

Four men in La Santé Prison, staring down the barrel at hard time, decide to execute a prison break and are forced to bring on a fifth member, Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), when he is assigned to their cell. The particulars of the escape are rendered in painstaking detail as the five men dream of freedom. Director Jacques Becker (whose Casque dor played at the 2017 Classic French Film Festival) cast the film largely with nonprofessionals, among them the actual king of escapes, Roland Barbat, on whose story the film is based. In Cahiers du Cinéma, director Jean-Pierre Melville said of Le trou: How many pages would it take to enumerate the wonders of this masterpiece, of this film that I consider and here I weigh my words carefully as the greatest French film of all time?

The Chicago Readers Dave Kehr writes: Released alongside Breathless and The 400 Blows, Jacques Beckers film was the last great flowering of French classicism; the tradition of quality here goes out with a masterpiece. Its a prison-break film, based on a true story, that follows the dictates of the genre almost every step of the way but makes the conventions shine with new life and meaning. The suspense is built slowly and carefully, through finely perceived physical details and quirks of character. The obvious comparison is to Bresson's A Man Escaped, but Becker has none of Bressons taste for abstraction; his film is rooted in the immediate, the concrete, the human.

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Andrew Wyatt, editor of and film critic for Cinema St. Louis The Lens and the Gateway Cinephile film blog.