Traversée de paris (Four Bags Full)

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Traversée de paris Blu-ray


Claude Autant-Lara's Traversée de paris a.k.a Four Bags Full (1956) has received a preliminary release date for the Gallic markets: November 2. Winner of the Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Bourvil) at the Venice Film Festival. Courtesy of Gaumont.

New York Times:

DIRECTOR Claude Autant-Lara and his scenarists, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, obviously men of many artistic moods, exhibit several of these in tough serio-comic style in "Four Bags Full," the French feature which opened at the Fifty-second Street Trans-Lux yesterday.

The import, a melodrama dealing with the furtive journey of a couple of black-market messengers across occupied Paris, also manages to dissect human frailties while garnering a few laughs en route. Although the trip, the script and the principals become a mite confused occasionally, it is, nevertheless, a spellbinding junket most of the way.

Our film-making team, known here chiefly for their sensitive treatment of aspects of amour in that fine Gallic drama "Devil in the Flesh," are neither delicate nor oblique in their approach to their current subject. They are treating in harsh, often black-and-white fashion, of people caught in a world they never made, who are struggling in it as best they can. M. Autant-Lara and his associates have as their heroes a simple ex-cab driver, who is involved in the black market because he has to exist, and a cynical but successful artist, who is accidentally caught up in the sordid business and follows through out of curiosity.

Their assignment, as has been indicated, is to lug four valises filled with the carcass of a newly butchered hog from one black marketeer to another. M. Autant-Lara is, as we were saying, not merely concerned with adventure here.

During the journey, the artist has occasion to lash out at black marketeers and berate the meanness of a bourgeois bistro owner, who is ready to turn them over to the police. In so doing, he appears to be castigating all those Frenchmen who engaged in unsavory practices while France chaffed under the heel of the Nazi oppressor.

The ex-cabbie, on the other hand, is not concerned with the subtleties of life. He is, one gathers, involved in this hazardous calling because he not only must live but also is in love with his wife and is doing all this mainly because of her. Although he appears to be a woebegone and terrified little man, he maintains his dignity. At the climax, when the war is over and the cabbie, now a porter in a Paris railroad station, is recognized by the artist, he is resigned to his job but still a dignified gent. "I'm still carrying other people's suitcases," he says.

As the ex-cabbie, Bourvil turns in a superb job of a little man caught in a web of circumstances far beyond his ken. It is a sharply-drawn portrait in which shrugs and grimaces as well as a neatly delivered dialogue add up to a truly terrified and confused citizen. M. Bourvil appears to deserve the acting award he won for this performance at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Jean Gabin's characterization of the artist is no less professional. As the dilettante embroiled in a strange adventure, he seems to be enjoying every minute of it as he cajoles his companion, badgers the black marketeers or softsoaps a Nazi commandant. Louis de Funes adds a humorous contribution as an explosive black marketeer; Jeanette Batti is appealing as Bourvil's wife, and a score of other players pitch in authentic bits as various Parisian types.

Although M. Autant-Lara's theme sometimes is as murky as the blacked-out capital, he has, nevertheless, kept his cast and story moving at a fast clip. More important, he also has taken the trouble to look into the hearts and minds of his principals to make "Four Bags Full" unusual and interesting.

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