Farewell, Friend

Dino and Barran served together in the Foreign Legion. Algeria is over and both are back in France. Dino is a doctor; he is thinking of finding work at a hospital. Barran does not know what to do and is looking for money. An offer comes: over the New Year holiday a company building empties and there is a safe in the basement with bonds inside. Dino takes the job. He goes down to the basement and finds Barran there; he is after the same safe. The two men spend five days locked in a basement. The safe does not open and a trap is being set outside. Jean Herman directs; Sébastien Japrisot wrote the screenplay. Alain Delon plays Dino and Charles Bronson plays Barran; Olga Georges-Picot and Bernard Fresson are in the cast. It is a French and Italian co-production, made in 1968. Charles Bronson became known in Europe through this film and worked often in European productions in the years that followed. Most of the narrative takes place in one location; the basement and the corridor carry the whole middle. The matter it treats is two men forced onto each other; neither likes the other and neither can get out alone. The film uses the heist shape but the safe is not the real question. There is little dialogue; the narrative moves through action and waiting. The last section turns into a courtroom scene and the manner changes. The narrative uses its women as part of the trap and leaves them no room. Its limit is pace; the middle is long, there is little event, and the ending explanatory. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties French crime films and Delon's work. Who it is not for: it is slow, confined, and the ending cold.