THE THIEF OF PARIS Movie Review

Le Voleur

This gentle study of a 19th-century burglar, Georges (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who enters his profession out of necessity but stays because of obsession, is one of the most unjustly overlooked films of Louis Malle's career. The Thief of Paris has many light moments, but at heart it's a gloomy and melancholy tale of a man lost in the details of his job—his work means everything to him, and he's willing to give everything up for it. Georges's obsession could have been based on that of an artist—a filmmaker such as Orson Welles, perhaps—but Georges has much more in common with the protagonist of Robert Bresson's 1959 masterpiece, Pickpocket. Bresson's thief was past mere obsession; his thefts took on a religious, transcendental intensity that went well beyond pride of craft, and I think that's what Malle is getting at here, but expressed in a lighter way, designed to be accessible to wider audiences. Still, the downbeat tone of The Thief of Paris (simply Le Voleur in France) didn't go over in the U.S.; it seemed to get lost in the much noisier, more violent world of 1967 cinema, and that's rather a shame. It's a delicate and surprisingly affecting work. It's visually beautiful too, yet when the movie was reissued in the late 1970s, the colors looked muddy and faded. It could use a genuine restoration.

NEXT STOP … Pickpocket, Breathless, To Catch a Thief

1967 120m/C Jean-Paul Belmondo, Genevieve Bujold, Marie DuBois, Julien Guiomar, Francoise Fabian, Marlene Jobert, Bernadette LaFont, Martine Sarcey, Roger Crouzet, Charles Denner, Paul Le Person, Christian Lude; D: Louis Malle; W: Louis Malle, Jean-Claude Carriere, Georges Darien; C: Henri Decae. NYR