Customer Reviews

The Crook

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was one of my favorite guilty-pleasure films of the early 70s. I've beeen waiting for decades for its release on VHS or DVD.
It's still fresh, stylish, funny, fast, clever, smart and, most of all, seamless in its ingeniously circular plot. With a hot-colored 70s backdrop. it has surprisingly naturalistic performances given the winking nature of the plot. And it captures the thrills of the thriller genre as well as any of the "real" ones from this era.
It's all in fun, especially the embedded musical-within-the-movie, also called "The Crook."
After the first viewing, you'll find yourself going back to try to find how the movie comes back on itself. Good luck!

Voyou aka The Crook/Simon the Swiss is one of Claude Lelouch's more polished efforts, reuniting him with Un Homme et Une Femme star Jean-Louis Trintignant in a good-looking number that's never quite a thriller, never quite a comedy and never quite a drama but which still passes the time pleasingly enough. The anarchy pretty much begins and ends with the striking opening musical number and a central flashback sequence that's so clumsily placed it takes you a good 20 minutes to realise you're watching a flashback, and it is difficult to root for a crook who kidnaps a small child (especially in light of recent events in the UK and Portugal), but it's not at all bad if you're in the right mood for it.

This is a cocktail that's part tense criminal portrait and part light-hearted caper served in a lushly romantic but referential style and at a pace that can charitably be described as leisurely. It's stylish and at times fascinating, but I was at a remove the whole time. This may be because I don't see the charm of Jean-Louis Trintignant -- to me he's just creepy. (Lelouch has fun posing him smoking on his bed, but he's no Alain Delon.)

Worth watching if you're in the mood for something colorful but decidedly low-key.

Classic great after 40 years. This heist movie was well ahead of its time. The plotting and ideas are really good even compared to today's standards