Le Trou
Short description
In a Paris prison in 1947, four cellmates have spent months preparing an escape, chipping away at the floor of their cell. Their plans are disrupted when a young inmate named Claude Gaspard is moved into their cell while awaiting trial. After some hesitation, the four men decide to trust him and reveal what they have been doing. He joins them, and the group of five works day and night to enlarge the opening and find a route out through the building's underground passages, knowing that any mistake or delay could cost them everything.
Jacques Becker directed the film, his fourth feature in the chronological order of his filmography, and wrote the screenplay with Jean Aurel and José Giovanni. Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier and Marc Michel play the five prisoners, with Jean-Paul Coquelin among the twenty-one credited cast members. Serge Silberman produced the Italian-French co-production, which runs 132 minutes.
The film holds an IMDb rating of 8.5 from nearly twenty thousand votes and a TMDB rating of 8.2 from several hundred. A critics' rating of 8.6 from eighteen reviews places it slightly above the audience scores, and the two audience ratings sit close together, indicating consistent appreciation across platforms.
What's left behind the scenes
- Director Jacques Becker died in 1960 at the age of 53, two weeks after finishing filming. The film was completed according to his wishes, but producer Serge Zilberman (1917-2003) cut 24 minutes of footage from the 140-minute version in the hope of improving the film’s commercial potential. The deleted scenes have never been seen again.
- To enhance the realism of what was happening on screen, Jacques Becker primarily used non-professional actors. In particular, one of the participants in the 1947 prison escape played a role in the film, which was based on real events.
- The sound in the film is entirely diegetic. This means it is sound reproduced within the world constructed inside the screen production. This category includes: character speech, ambient sounds, and music whose source is located within the world of the production. The source of diegetic sound is not always in the frame, meaning it's the sound that the characters can hear.
- With the help of three participants in the 1947 escape, who were brought on as consultants to the film crew, the setting of the "Sante" prison was recreated down to the smallest detail.
- This was the first film in the career of 13-year-old Katrine Spaaek at the time. She even played without her last name being mentioned in the credits, but her performance impressed a Parisian television reporter who interviewed her. The interview, in turn, caught the eye of Sophia Loren, who immediately realized that the teenage girl was perfect for the lead role in "Sweet Deception" (Alberto Lattuada, 1960), for which Loren's husband and producer Carlo Ponti was actively casting actors.
- According to newspaper reports from 1964, Jacques Becker first learned about the 1947 escape from the "Sante" prison from a newspaper. Years later, Becker discovered that in 1957, José Giovanni (1923-2004) had written a novel called "The Escape" about an escape attempt in which he himself had participated. Becker contacted Giovanni through his publisher with an offer to write the screenplay for the film.
- The nearly 4-minute scene in which prisoners break through the concrete floor of the cell was filmed without breaks.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
