TONIGHT! CROOKS IN CLOVER (LES TONTONS FLINGUEURS) AT PRIMROSE HILL COMMUNITY LIBRARY.

Our first French film

The 1960s cult classic gangster film

Les Tontons Flingueurs

(“Monsieur Gangster” or “Crooks in Clover”)

Sub-titles

Introduction by our very own French film expert, Jean-Christophe Slowik, JC from L’Absinthe

The Introduction is at 7.45pm, with the film at 8.00pm, at Primrose Hill Community Library. Doors open at 7.30pm.

Starring Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, Francis Blanche

Director Georges Lautner

Screenplay Georges Lautner, Albert Simonin and Michel Audiard

France 1963 105 minutes

“The subversive humour and razor-sharp dialogue of the crime comedies Georges Lautner directed in the 1960s was often lost in translation, but in his native France they enjoyed a popularity comparable to the Ealing comedies in Britain. Les Tontons Flingueurs (known as Crooks In Clover or Monsieur Gangster,1963) outshone them all and grew from attracting half a million Parisian cinema-goers in its first six months into a cross-generational cult movie. It has become a cornerstone of French popular culture, spawning books and references galore on websites and in everyday parlance.

Adapted by Lautner, Michel Audiard and Albert Simonin from his own thriller Grisbi Or Not Grisbi – a Shakespearean pun on one of the many French slang words for money – Les Tontons Flingueurs transcended its standard plot of a “retired” hoodlum coming to the aid of a dying former accomplice and fighting off various factions to reach a level of surrealism and irreverence unusual for the genre at the time. Lautner’s trademark technique of close-ups and tight edits, combined with Audiard’s riff-fuelled, ratatatat dialogue, gave his films a manic quality and frantic energy that influenced directors like Quentin Tarantino.”