Picture of the movie Échec au porteur (Not Delivered) © Echec au porteur © 1958 - OREX FILMS
Not Delivered, or when Gilles Grangier fell under the spell of crime films
In 1957’s Échec au Porteur (Not Delivered), presented at Cannes Classics in a restored version, Gilles Grangier gets Serge Reggiani, Jeanne Moreau and Paul Meurisse mixed up in a light crime film about a football filled with explosives.
Bastien Sassey (Serge Reggiani) transports drugs for a group of traffickers led by a man named Stan the Armenian. Having decided to give up a life of crime for a brighter future with the beautiful Jacqueline (Jeanne Moreau), he hooks up with Hans, the leader of a rival gang, to deliver a football equipped with a time bomb to Stan.
After an unfortunate series of circumstances, the ball falls into the hands of a group of children playing nearby. Alerted to this, Superintendent Varzeilles (Paul Meurisse) has to find the traffickers and the explosive football before 10 pm. A race against time has begun…
Gilles Grangier had already directed over thirty films – in a fifteen year career – when, in 1957, he took to adapting Noël Calef’s novel Échec au Porteur, which came out the same year and had garnered much critical praise, including the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres prize. At a time when the French New Wave was taking off, the prolific filmmaker was in the midst of one of the key periods of his filmography, one devoted to film noir.
He would then go on to direct two other giants of French cinema: Jean Gabin in Le Désordre et la nuit (The Night Affair) and in Archimède le Clochard (The Magnificent Tramp) and Lino Ventura in 125 rue Montmartre, where he moves away of the American influence of the genre to make a more French-style crime film.
