MICHEL AUDIARD - ALBERT SIMONIN
Le cave se rebiffe, Mélodie en sous-sol, Les Tontons flingueurs Edited by Franck Lhomeau 17 × 24 cm 1,008 pages 70 black and white illustrations softback coedition institut lumière/actes sud october 2021 estimated retail price: 35 €
This edition is presented and annotated by Franck Lhomeau, who has written several monographs on Michel Audiard and is also the publisher of his cinema chronicles from 1946 to 1949, his book Chaque fois qu’un innocent a l’idée de monter un chef-d’œuvre, le chœur des cafards entre en transe (Joseph k., 2020), and the forthcoming unpublished short stories and articles Ça ne me regarde pas…, (Joseph k., 2021).
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hen they pooled their talents in the early 1960s, Michel Audiard and Albert Simonin already had a string of cinema credits under their belts. But these masters of adaptation and dialogue went on to create three feature films together that stand out in their filmography: Le cave se rebiffe (The Counterfeiters of Paris, 1961) by Gilles Grangier, Mélodie en soussol (Any Number Can Win, 1963) by Henri Verneuil, and Les Tontons flingueurs (1963) by Georges Lautner. Three films based on novels from Gallimard’s “Série noire” collection to which Simonin made a striking debut contribution with Touchez pas au grisbi ! (1953), which was immediately adapted for the screen by Jacques Becker. Moving away from the realistic style of this first adventure of Max le Menteur, Simonin subsequently offered Grangier and then Lautner tongue-in-cheek adaptations of his next two novels, Le cave se rebiffe and Les Tontons flingueurs. These
20 - arts > cinema
were turned into films in which screenwriter Michel Audiard gave full rein to his talent for humour and memorable one-liners, which have since achieved a lasting place in French popular culture. Remaining in the world of gangsters but shifting to another register, the two men then collaborated on the screenplay of The Big Grab, a crime novel by John Trinian which Verneuil transposed to the Palm Beach casino in Cannes. In the resulting film Mélodie en sous-sol, the “master of realist storytelling” Simonin takes cares of the story of the hold-up while Audiard comes up with a new minimalist form of dialogue for grey-haired gangster Jean Gabin and his impetuous accomplice Alain Delon, with whom he plans to pull one last job. In 1963, Les Tontons flingueurs and Mélodie en soussol featured among the ten highest-grossing films of the year, just behind The Leopard by Luchino Visconti (in which Delon also excelled) and well ahead of Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers.
