Main Cast: Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sandra Milo, Jacques Dacqmine
Release Year: 1960
Country: FR/IT
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
A criminal on the run finds going home after a decade is harder than he expects in this drama from French filmmaker Claude Sautet. Gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) is wanted for murder in France, and has been living underground in Italy for ten years. Since then, Abel has married Therese (Simone France) and fathered two sons, and he's decided it's time to come home. Abel has planed an elaborate scheme in which he'll steal a fortune to finance his journey and head home with Therese and the boys, but little goes as planned, and he arrives in Paris without his wife and running from the law with two kids in tow. An underworld boss who owes Abel some favors helps him put together a plan to travel across France in an ambulance to avoid suspicion, and recruits a headstrong young gangster, Eric (Jean-Paul Belmondo), to serve as Abel's driver and right-hand-man. En route, Abel tries to settle some old score with criminal associates who betrayed him. Based on a novel by Jose Giovanni, Classe Tous Risques was the first feature film from Sautet, who previously had worked as an assistant director for some of France's most prestigious filmmakers. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Classe tous risques (Consider All Risks, first released in the U.S. as The Big Risk) is a 1960 FrenchItalianInternational co-productionblack-and-whitegangster film directed by Claude Sautet and starring Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Sandra Milo, which wasn't in high esteem at the time of its release, overshadowed by the French New Wave, but nevertheless greatly influenced the French cinema, especially Jean-Pierre Melville's work. However, in Finland the film was banned from 1961 to 1968. It is an adaptation of a novel by José Giovanni, telling the story of Abel Davos (Ventura), French mobster trying to make his way from Italy through Marseille to Paris and hunted by the police, and Eric Stark (Belmondo), who turns out to be the only person willing to help Davos.
