125 rue Montmartre

Lino Ventura is an ex-boxer who makes a living as a newsboy. People know him, they like him, he sleeps with Dora Doll occasionally. He sells his papers on the Pont D'Alma, then goes underneath to smoke a cigarette. Robert Hirsch throws himself into the Seine, and Ventura rescues him. Hirsch tells him an incoherent story about being a landowner, lured into a quick marriage with Andréa Parisy. Then the brother-in-law shows up and the two of them drive him mad. He fled to Paris, and tried to kill himself. Ventura is fed up with this after two days and takes him to his home, but refuses to go in. Ventura goes in and Mlle Parisy tells him her husband has tried to kill himself three times. There's no farm. She asks him to get her husband to come back. Ventura returns to Paris, and there Hirsch is, with proof of what he has said. Again, he takes Ventura to the house, telling him about 400,000 francs in a locked secretary desk, and where the key is. Again, Hirsch refuses to go in, so Ventura does, finds the money, only now there's a corpse in the salon, and police, whom Mlle Parisy identifies as her husband. The police arrest Ventura...

It's a well written and performed movie from director Gilles Grangier, a skilled commercial director. He keeps each sequence going long enough to begin to test the audience's patience, then moves on in an unexpected direction, thanks, no doubt, to the prize-winning policier by André Gillois it's derived from. Jean Desailly plays the canny detective well, and Ventura is excellent as a lug in this near-Hitchcockian movie.