FROM THE VAULT: 1959
Pickpocket
Starring: Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie
Director: Robert Bresson
The film: French director Robert Bresson stopped using professional actors early in his career, and while his desire to capture natural behaviour rather than 'performance' with this approach has been questioned by some, it worked well with Pickpocket. Then-unknown Martin La Salle's portrayal of a morally questionable dropout starting out on a career as a pickpocket plays well in tandem with his lack of experience in front of the camera. His nervous tension throughout the film is almost palpable; from his first hesitant fumblings with a woman's handbag at the Longchamp racecourse to his final, well-rehearsed movements back at the same location.
A series of French films made during the 1950s and early 1960s came in for official criticism for their depiction of how to break the law: Jacques Becker's Le Trou (1960) gave useful tips on how to escape from prison, for example, and Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) gave an onscreen master class, later put to good use by real-life villains, in how to perform a jewellery heist. For Pickpocket, Bresson hired onetime wallet lifter-turned-cabaret artist Kassagi as a technical adviser and gave him a significant role as La Salle's light-fingered accomplice. There are several intriguing montage sequences both of training and actual thieving, all set to 17th-century music from Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera Atys.