La Bande à Bonnot (1968)
Directed by Philippe Fourastié

Film Review

1968 was an eventful year for France.  In the dying days of the De Gaulle presidency, the spirit of revolution was in the air and the appetite for far-reaching social reforms had never been greater.  In that memorable spring of 1968 the country came perilously close to civil war, with widespread demonstrations and a brief period of civil unrest that saw almost a quarter of the population go on strike.  It was a dramatic time, with old resentments and new concerns for the future brimming over as France teetered on the brink of outright chaos.  In no other film of this traumatic year is this sense of impending social breakdown more strongly evoked than in Philippe Fourastié's La Bande à Bonnot, one of the most violent films to be screened in French cinemas before the relaxation of the censorship rules in the 1970s (evidenced by the fact it was released with an 18 certificate).

Boasting a top-notch cast (Bruno Cremer, Jacques Brel, Annie Girardot and Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and an alarming body count, the film recounts, in graphic detail, the murderous exploits of one of France's most notorious criminal gangs, the so-called Bonnot gang.  Motivated by anarchist anti-bourgeois ideology, this formidable gang of trigger-happy hotheads embarked on a fierce campaign of murder and pillage across France and Belgium at the time of the Belle Époque before being brought to justice in 1912.  This was the first gang to make use of the motorcar, which gave them an immediate advantage over the police who still went about on horseback and bicycle.   The Bonnot gang's main claim to fame is that it was the first gang to use a car as a get-away vehicle, after robbing the Société Générale Bank in Paris.  The gang's activities resulted in a huge crackdown by the authorities against anarchists and their sympathisers and a massive overhaul of policing in France.

Whilst Fourastié's film plays fast and loose with historical fact and makes next to no attempt to understand the psychology of Bonnot and his partners in crime, it does provide a harrowingly true-to-life sense of the scale and impact of the Bonnot gang's reign of terror.  The characterisation is generally weak and sheds little light on the personality and motives of the criminals, but the production values are excellent.  On the plus side, the film offers an authentic reconstruction of France circa 1911 and its spectacular action scenes (the high point being the climactic showdown between the gang and the police) are choreographed with immense dramatic and visual flair.  It prefigures the increasingly realistic retro-gangster films that would be made in France over the next decade, most notably Jacques Deray's Borsalino (1970).

La Bande à Bonnot is to French cinema and culture pretty well what Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is to their American counterparts.  Both films were born out of and reflect the burgeoning counter-culture movement in their respective countries, each reflecting the incendiary anti-authority, pro-freedom ethos of a disenchanted, openly rebellious generation.  Fourastié's film may not attain the lyrical power of Penn's film but it is just as evocative of the revolutionary mood that so vividly coloured the final years of the 1960s and endured into the mid-1970s.

Unlike Penn, who can be legitimately charged with romanticising the exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Fourastié makes no attempt to cast his murderous gangsters as heroes.  From the outset, they impress us as misguided social outsiders, who surrender their legitimacy as a force for social good as soon as they pick up a gun and start shooting at people.  We have no sympathy for any member of Bonnot's gang, least of all for Bonnot himself, who, portrayed by Bruno Cremer at his most demonically chilling, comes across not as a committed revolutionary but as a cold-hearted killer intent on waging a private war against the whole civilised world.

Unlikely as it may seem, this was the second of only two films that Philippe Fourastié directed for the cinema.  Previously he had worked as an assistant to some of the leading lights of the French New Wave (Chabrol, Rivette and Godard) before making his directing debut with Un choix d'assassins (1966).  He concluded his directing career in 1972 with a serial for French television entitled Mandrin.  On La Bande à Bonnot, Fourastié was assisted by Claude Miller, a former production manager for François Truffaut who later became a significant auteur in French cinema.  The adventures of Jules Bonnot and his gang also featured in a popular French television series of the 1970s, Les Brigades du Tigre, which would be remade in 2006 into a film of the same title, directed by Jérôme Cornuau.  Fourastié's film is less significant as a biographical account of Jules Bonnot and his gang than as a stark evocation of the tumultuous period in which it was made.

Film Synopsis

In 1911, a group of hard-line anarchists - including Raymond-la-science, Garnier, Carouy, Soudy and Marie la Belge - give up their peaceful struggle against the bourgeoisie and, led by Jules Bonnot, become a gang of desperate armed criminals.  Doggedly pursued by Jouin, one of the Sureté's top men, the gang embarks on a campaign of terror across France, killing people in the street and raiding banks.  Stealing motorcars to assist them in their war against the bourgeois capitalist system, Bonnot's gang evades justice for a while, but eventually the law is bound to catch up with them...