When it comes to heist movies, we owe a lot to the French. No matter if a heist's ringleader is an ice-cold, sharpened criminal tool, or a suave, romantic con man, or a fidgety, terse gangster, there exists a precedent in French genre films that inspired English-language writers and filmmakers. Films like Riffifi, Le Cercle Rouge, La Deuxième Souffle, The Wages of Fear, or A Man Escaped have a tough, unfeeling exterior that incrementally reveals the meticulous and anxious personalities that drive a bank robbery, diamond looting, or prison escape. We should think of Jean-Pierre Melville and Henri-Georges Clouzot as cinematic pioneers in the same ways that Frenchmen Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers lay the foundations of moving image artistry.
American crime films have leaned on the equally stylish and sordid legacy of European thrillers for decades: watching To Catch a Thief, Ronin, and Ocean’s Twelve back-to-back may give you final whiplash, but these films all juxtapose casual, anonymous vacationing with infiltrating bank, museums, and private stashes older than the United States. After Hitchcock and Soderbergh, we can now add Den of Thieves: Pantera director Christian Gudegast to the list of directors in touch with this transcontinental tradition.
