A Walrus Without Clams

Any Number Can Win. In the vintage Hollywood gangland formula, crooks are 98% repulsive and viewers can't wait to see them burn. In the French switch on this, as refined in Rififi (1956), things are the other way round: attractive criminals get girls, gats and a clockwork plan for a caper, and the audience roots for them to The End. French clockwork, however, is not always reliable, and this amoral little melodrama starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon ticks only intermittently.

As a two-time loser dourly dedicated to his craft, Gabin comes out of prison and plunges right into a plot to lift 1,000,000,000 francs from the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes. But suspense-wise the film fails to break even until Accomplice Delon takes up a tommy gun, crawls on his belly through an air conditioning duct that appears approximately as long and tortuous as the Grande Corniche, and shinnies down an elevator cable into the casino's vault--just in time to break the bank.

Thereafter, on a predictable split-second schedule, practically everything goes wrong. At the climax, Old Wave Director Henri Verneuil achieves a scene that is a gem of understatement. Plopped down at poolside like a bull walrus minus his tusks and a billion clams, Veteran Actor Gabin blinks goodbye to his ill-gotten gains, filling the moment with memorable stupefaction. Best side bets of Any Number Can Win are glimpses of the human flotsam and jetsam beached on the Riviera, but all in all it is a cinematic gamble that never quite pays off.

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