Word: crooked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WONDERFUL CROOK Directed and Written by CLAUDE GORETTA
...Wonderful Crook would have given Karl Marx the willies. It describes a diffident young capitalist, Pierre Vauchez, who takes over the family furniture factory after his father's stroke and finds that the business is virtually broke. Pierre cares too much about the workers and their traditional craft to close the factory, so he fakes orders, carts away shipments to be burned secretly and, in his simplest and most desperate expedient, begins pulling armed robberies to meet the payroll. Talk about bourgeois paternalism! Letting the workers profit from the boss's labor may be bad economics...
Goretta. 47. was previously represented in this country only by The Invitation (1975), a Chekhovian study of a disintegrating office party. In Wonderful Crook, the actors readily grasp the same light-handed spirit. Marlene Jobert as Nelly may be a little too refined for a post office clerk, and Gerard Depardieu as Pierre may be low-keyed to the point of occasional inaudibility: but both, along with Dominique Labourier as the wife, give performances of great charm...
Unluckily, coming so soon after Fun with Dick and Jane (TIME. Feb. 7), the movie runs the risk of being dismissed as another middle-class crime caper. But unlike Dick and Jane. Crook yields to no glibness. no gags, no cheap shots at the System. Goretta's comedy arises from sharp but sympathetic observation of the ways in which ordinary, well-meaning people stumble into one sad mess after another. Christopher Porterfield
...Wonderful Crook evokes a feeling for the complexity of human behavior without resorting to cliche or to the overdramatic drawn out dialogues that belong on the stage, not on the screen. It presents a picture of bourgeois life that ultimately is dark, though not without hope, and certainly not without mystery and adventure...