LE TROU (1960)

A man stops working on his car and addresses the camera. He informs us that his friend the director Jacques Becker based the movie we're about to see on a true story. It's the man's own story, and he's an actor in it, but he won't be playing himself. His plan to escape from prison inspired a novel by Jose Giovanni, an ex-con in his own right and a key figure in French crime literature and film. Le Trou ("The Hole") adapts that novel, and the real con, Jean Keraudy, plays his fictional avatar, Roland Darbant. Becker himself, perhaps best known in America for the noirish Touchez pas au Grisbi, didn't live to see the film released.

Keraudy/Darbant is one of four cons who've volunteered for work making cardboard boxes in their shared cell. They're joined by a fifth prisoner, Claude Gaspard (Mark Michel), who's been transferred while his original cell is under repair. Claude faces an attempted murder charge for taking a shot at his wife. It's a he-said-she-said situation and doesn't look good for him. He may be desperate enough to be trusted with his new cellmates' secret. The pile of cardboard the guards have nicely brought in for them is going to conceal a hole they mean to dig through the cement floor of their cell. That should get them into the service corridors, and from there they hope to get into the sewer system and escape through a convenient manhole cover. Their cell is an enclosed room, and they'll do their digging by day, when the sound should be obscured by the other noises of daily routine. Claude ingratiates himself with his cellmates by sharing his food packages and joins in the step-by-step, day-by-day business of finding a way out of prison. He comes to respect the industrious cons and experiences an ironic kind of rehabilitation through labor, until word comes that his wife is going to drop the charges against him. He may be able to walk out the front door, but what does that mean for his new friends who plan an earlier exit?...

The view through a cell door via "periscope" -- a shard of glass mounted on a toothbrush. A typical instance of convict creativity in Le Trou.

Le Trou is a prison-break movie but not a crime film. Giovanni and Becker don't have a study of the criminal mind in mind. Instead, the movie is very much about the ennobling quality of work, even if that work contradicts the rehabilatory purpose of prison confinement. However bad the prisoners may have been on the other side, they demonstrate all the bourgeois virtues of teamwork and time-management as conspirators, even improvising their own hourglass so they can keep track of time while digging underground. They also demonstrate working-class solidarity, until the moment when Claude gets an exclusive chance at freedom. What happens later leaves you asking who the real criminals are.

The French seem to excel at a certain kind of open-ended thriller. While thriller scenarios often involve races against time, deadlines or ticking clocks, French filmmakers like Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville are good at letting a situation develop in naturalistic fashion while instilling a sense that something bad could happen at any moment. Le Trou has a perfect example of this on the first day of digging in the cell. The cons peel away some slats of parquet flooring and start whacking away at the hard surface beneath with a tool cannibalized from a metal bunk frame. The sound is alarmingly loud; it seems impossible that the guards won't hear it, but we've been insured that they won't really notice. Meanwhile, Becker focuses on that patch of floor as the cons hack away at it. It looks like a real floor and you can hardly choreograph the digging process. You can't know how long it should take, though one con has said, "In an hour we'll be through or we'll be caught." It'll be a make or break scene for any viewer. Some will want to fast-forward until the cons hit paydirt. Others will be riveted by the suspenseful illusion of an arduous real-time task with men's fates at stake.

Becker has prefaced the action with long character-developing scenes as Claude befriends the other cons. By the time they go to work, you should be on their side, especially after they experience the casual (as opposed to the violently cliched) humiliations of prison life, from routine pat-down searches to seeing their food shipments manhandled and torn up by guards in search of contraband. Maybe they deserve it, but Becker's compassionate, humanistic stance seems to be that no one should have to live like that. Arguably, he and Giovanni stack the deck in the cons' favor by focusing on their humanity rather than their criminality, but you'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to root for the cons or for Claude not to screw them over when an opportunity arises.

Most of the commentary I've seen on Le Trou treats the film as some sort of response to a different kind of breakout movie, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped. I haven't seen that film, though the comparisons make me want to do so. All I can say is that, on its own terms, Le Trou is one of the better prison-break movies that I've seen.