Cinema: Mayhem in Marseille

Borsalino is a silly Gallic gangster flick that means no harm. It's good enough fun, in a kind of punch-drunk way, what with all its elaborate costumes, its opulent sets, its duke-outs, shootups and gang wars. But in their campy zeal to duplicate the hard-boiled crime genre of the '30s and '40s, the film makers lapse frequently into a kind of hysterical, hell-for-leather hyperbole that gives the movie an air of burlesque gone overboard.

The plot could have been lifted from a 1933 story conference at Warner Brothers. Siffredi (Alain Delon) is a petty crook, all bile and brilliantine, who goes looking for his girl friend Lola (Catherine Rouvel) after his latest prison term has expired. Stalking the streets of Marseille, he finally finds her happily biding her time with a nattily tailored sharpie named Capella (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Siffredi immediately initiates repossession proceedings. Capella only grins. Siffredi glowers. Capella still grins. Then, of course, they fight. After knocking each other around for a while, over pool tables, into mirrors, across bars, that sort of thing, they reach a stalemate, become friends, share a plate of bouillabaisse and form a partnership. Lola takes a back seat to business.

The boys start off small, rigging prizefights and fixing horse races. Gradually they work their way up through the protection racket until they control the Marseille fish market, the Marseille meat market, most of the town's gambling and some of the town council. But Capella and Siffredi learn that their hard-earned infamy has made them obvious targets for a new generation of ambitious crooks—and for each other.

Like its two heroes, Borsalino sets itself up for the kill. It is not clever enough to be a successful parody and not tough enough to be a good genre piece. Delon moves through the picture like a still-warm stiff en route to a comfortable slab in the morgue, but Belmondo, mugging furiously and retaining just the right air of detachment, compensates by providing enough energy for this and at least three other movies. The music is loud and engaging and so are the costumes, which look like something from an old Esquire layout. Men's clothes, indeed, dominate Borsalino to such a degree that the actors become mannequins in a particularly elaborate but decidedly ephemeral fashion show.

— J.C.