Word: crookedly
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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...
Pierre, the main character in Pas si Mechant que ca (or The Wonderful Crook as its American promoters have inadequately dubbed it) looks strong, clumsy and dumb--like the stereotypical college football star. The opening sequences of the film cut from a shot of Pierre armwrestling with his fellow workers to one of the boss yelling because Pierre is "always playing around" and has lacquered a board that should have remained natural. So, when the foreman calls for Pierre we expect he will be reprimanded and find out instead that the boss is, in fact, Pierre's father, and that...
...Pill, learns Spanish from a record, and with whom he cannot share his problems. Donning a beret and mounting a motorbike, Pierre cuts through the distinctive patches of gold and green that mark the Swiss countryside and becomes a hero in the style of Robin Hood. He is the crook who steals in the interest of his employees, possessing a tremendous sense of generosity, however vague and misdirected...
...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...