The Big Risk
Short description
Abel Davos is a career criminal who has been sentenced to death in absentia in France and has spent years hiding in Italy. To fund a new life for his wife and two young sons back home, he and an accomplice carry out a brazen daylight payroll robbery in Milan and flee. The escape goes badly wrong at the French border, and Abel, left alone with his children and hunted by both the police and former associates who want nothing to do with him, turns to old friends in Paris for help. They send a stranger instead: Éric Stark, a younger crook who hides the fugitive and his boys and gradually becomes his closest ally.
Claude Sautet directed this crime film, his first feature, which precedes The Dictator's Guns, Cesar and Rosalie, Mado and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud in his filmography. Lino Ventura plays Abel, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as Éric Stark, Sandra Milo as Liliane, Marcel Dalio as Arthur Gibelin, Michel Ardan as Henri Vintran and Simone Desmaison as Thérèse Davos, among a credited cast of thirty-one. It is a French and Italian production produced by Jean Darvey, running 110 minutes.
Released in March 1960, the film holds a rating of 7 out of 10 on TMDB from 153 votes, indicating a modest but clearly favorable response from those who have seen it.
What's left behind the scenes
- It is said that Davo's deceased friend, Raymond Naldi, was once a member of the Mad Pierrot gang. In real life, gangster Abel Danò, nicknamed 'The Mammoth,' was also in this gang; during the occupation, he managed to be both a Resistance fighter (from which he was quickly expelled) and a Gestapo agent (for three years). Abel Danò was executed by firing squad in 1952.
- The scene depicting the attack on armored car guards in Milan at the beginning of the film was shot with hidden cameras. None of the passersby suspected that a movie was being filmed. As a result, the level of realism exceeded the director's expectations: the actors had to flee from the bystanders, and someone in the crowd suffered a heart attack.
- Jean-Paul Belmondo appeared in this film thanks to the patronage of Lino Ventura. Claude Sautet also spent a long time advocating for the young actor to the film's producers.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
