Most of his films are currently unavailable on video or DVD - including even the luminous ''Casque d'Or,'' which made a star of Simone Signoret. It's a shame that Becker's pictures aren't better known in the United States honesty isn't in such long supply among our auteurs either. Truffaut and his colleagues, that is, could not evaluate an American movie by its fidelity to lived experience, but they did judge the films of their compatriots that way and their judgment was that Becker was, almost alone among the filmmakers of his generation, an honest man. And Jacques Becker put as much specific French reality in his films as anyone save his great mentor, Jean Renoir (who, in 1954, had not made a movie in his native country in 15 years). The Cahiers gang looked to French films, however, for ways of capturing the real circumstances of life - of their own, French, lives - on the screen. But Huston and Wyler were American, and the young French critics, who would a few years later form the nucleus of the New Wave, looked to our films for myth, for intimations of the almost mystical power they attributed to cinema. The instructive, and kind of amusing, thing about that passage is that Truffaut seems to be describing precisely the sort of filmmaker he and his auteurist colleagues militantly disapproved of, like John Huston or William Wyler: a versatile director without an easily identifiable style. The truth is that Becker has no intention of mystifying or demystifying anyone his films are neither statements nor indictments.'' Neither he nor his work encourages commentary, and so much the better for that. ''There are no theories in circulation about Jacques Becker,'' he wrote, ''no scholarly analyses, no theses. François Truffaut, in fact, felt compelled to begin his laudatory Cahiers du Cinéma review of ''Grisbi'' with a string of negatives. The variety of Becker's subjects makes his work a little elusive, resistant to definition. He once described himself as ''a bit of an entomologist,'' and the specimens he examined on film include a rural family (''Goupi Mains Rouges,'' 1943), a young working-class couple in Paris (''Antoine et Antoinette,'' 1947), Left Bank jazz fans (''Rendez-vous de Juillet,'' 1949), turn-of-the-century thugs and the women who love them (''Casque d'Or,'' 1952), struggling artists (''Montparnasse 19,'' 1958) and five prisoners trying to tunnel out of jail (''Le Trou,'' 1960). Which is what makes him interesting to Jacques Becker, whose diverse films are united only by their fascination with the minutest particulars of people's - French people's - lives. The supremely self-confident hero of ''Touchez pas au Grisbi'' is something different: he's a force of culture. The American gangster, feral and insecure, has traditionally been presented on screen as a force of nature. Max is an unambiguously tough guy, but he moves at his own stately, unhurried pace. Our Scarfaces and our Little Caesars never had the enviable serenity of this Parisian hood - the sense of being totally at ease in their own skins. Max doesn't need to prove to anyone that he has arrived as Gabin plays him, he looks as if he has always been exactly where he is, as solid and as apparently immutable as a paving stone in the Place Pigalle. Max (Jean Gabin), the movie's middle-aged hero, is a man who enjoys his creature comforts - good food, fine wine, beautiful women, freshly laundered pajamas - and, in stark contrast to the striving, driven gangsters of the Depression-era American films that set the standards for the genre, he enjoys them entirely for their own sake, not as symbols of his status as a grand fromage in the underworld. That may sound like an insignificant detail, but in Jacques Becker's work the details are everything. In ''Touchez pas au Grisbi,'' real men eat paté. That picture (now in a new, and newly subtitled, print) 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. THE director Jacques Becker once told an interviewer, ''I am French I make films about French people I look at French people I am interested in French people.'' Among the 13 features he made in his too-brief career - he died in 1960, at 53 - none provides more conclusive proof of that defiant Frenchness than the elegant 1954 gangster movie ''Touchez pas au Grisbi'' (''Don't Touch the Loot''), which will play for two weeks at Film Forum beginning Friday.
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