Du rififi à Paname

No, it's not Panama; Paname is slang for Paris. It's from another August le Breton movie, and it stars Jean Gabin, with a big role for Gert Frobe and a featured part for a coin-flipping George Raft. If Paramount was producing Geezer westerns in the States, then perhaps this was a Geezer Gangster flick.

Gabin and Frobe have a racket smuggling gold into Tokyo and antiquities out of Japan. They use people with no police records and have settled on Claudio Brook, a reporter. What they don't know is that he is an undercover agent investigating their racket, and one that Frobe has smuggling spare parts into Cuba. As he worms his way into Gabin's graces, some one is trying to muscle in on the racket, blowing up associates in Munich and London. Frobe wants to abandon the Tokyo run for another, better idea. Gabin wants to keep going until the new one is paying. Nadja Tiller, Frobe's wife and Gabin's ex-lover, wants to fight.

It's still le Breton's world as first seen in Jules Dassin's movie, only bigger, brighter and in wide screen. Little fish have gotten bigger and attracted the notice of big fish on both sides of the law, but it's still guys with some rules against guys with none. The time for such movies was passing. The New Wave had no use for movies like this, but so long as as Gabin was willing to appear in them, they would still keep making them; and I will still watch and enjoy them fifty years later.