Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954)

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (director Jacques Becker, 1954) is a consumate French classic.

If you’re looking for something different, a new angle on the gangster genre, then you are implored to check it out.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi ("Don't Touch The Loot") has a great story, superior performances, largely from Jean Gabin, but most essentially it plays against a great backdrop of thugs, prostitutes and other underworld characters — here shot in many genuinely seedy settings in and around Montmartre.

A good gangster film always demands this kind of background colour, and Grisbi has it all.  Merd Alors, it’s 60 years old but it is as burning hot as any turd Tarantino might turn out!

I promise you'll love it.

La Grande Illusion (1937)

La Grande Illusion (1937) is a film about class issues, that doesn't take sides. 

It's an intreresting take, and pretty unusual when you think about it. But La Grande Illusion doesn't present nor admit to a bias and sees everybody as sympathetic, including the tragic aristocrats at the heart of the problems.

La Grande Illusion does at the same pretend to a strange vision of trench warfare.  In the first scene Jean Gabin is in his shoddily built mess, which has a well-stocked bar and waiter.  

The very next scene shows the actor Eric Von Stroheim and the Germans in their own similarly shack-like officers' mess, with an even better bar, again with its own proud barkeep.

Maybe that was what it was like.  I don't know, but the German bar certainly seems to have a hell of a lot of liquor as well as a cocktail shaker.