The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor; in Touchez Pas au Grisbi, the critic Terrence Rafferty writes, “real men eat pâté,” and this is “among the very few French movies about the criminal class in which neither the characters nor the filmmakers are afflicted by the delusion that they are Americans.” A few years later, in Godard’s Breathless (1960), Belmondo would be deliberately channeling Bogart, but here Gabin is channeling only himself. He is the original, so there is no need to look for inspiration.