The Good and the Bad

Jacques was a mechanic who turned to theft; Simon is his Jewish partner. The two of them start working together well before the war. When the Germans occupy France, what they do stays the same but what it means changes: a robbery is no longer simply a crime, and depending on the circumstances it can count as resistance. The policeman on their trail has to pick his own side in the same period. Claude Lelouch's film does not tell the occupation years from any morally clear position: the same person can be both a thief and a resistant, and the same policeman can be doing his job and working for the Gestapo. That period was not told this way in France for a long time, and the film was argued about when it came out for exactly that reason. Jacques Dutronc, Marlène Jobert and Bruno Cremer are in the cast. The telling runs to two hours and its tone keeps shifting between comedy and drama.