:Raymond Rouleau and Georges Rollin graduate from the detective academy of the capital of a fictional South American country. They are tied for the highest grade, which is a problem, since who is to be valedictorian? Rouleau suggests a practical test to break th tie, so when a murder occurs in an elegnt hotel, he and Rollin are sent to solve it. About 40 minutes after the movie begins, Rouleau has the solution: the dead man was the most wanted criminal in America, and his girlfriend Catherine Cayret confesses. Since this is a French movie, we can say "Eh bien!" and move on to the major problem: why is the dead man's partner, Pierre Renoir hanging around, what happened to his $400,000, and how many people will he and his associates kill to recover it. Rouleau plays turncoat to find out.

Jacques Becker's movie is aa trange one. It starts out as a light-hearted mystery, but soon we are into desperate gangster territory. We have an incompetent police officer in Noël Roquevert, more interested in keeping his job than doing it. It's not corruption, precisely, and since it's a French film and some South American country where they hold bullfights, no censor is going to get upset. But I kept trying to fit it into some genre, and it simply wouldn't go. The elegant sets -- an Art Deco hotel, and even the stairwells of the police precinct has ruffled curtains -- the disrespect towards authorities, the boyish glee of the new graduates: none of these hang together in any recognizable way. Because it is Becker's first time directing a feature, and he's not working from his own script, I can only conclude this is not really a Becker film; he would follow it up with GOUPI MAINS ROUGE, but not begin to attain a consistent voice until the 1950s. For now, he's a cheap director for hire, and the result is watchable.

I saw this film when it was shown on BBC2 in 1989, but had absolutely no memory of it, so watched it again today. It's a good-looking, agreeable potboiler, set in a fictitious Latin American country in order to avoid controversy (obviously gangsters couldn't operate at large in law-abiding Vichyite France the way they openly do here).

Closer to a comedy thriller than a straight crime film, and brightly lit for adventure rather than drama by cameraman Nicolas Hayer, 'Dernier Atout' stars Raymond Rouleau as a jaunty crack-shot detective who takes the place of American gangster Gaston Modot in a gang led by dastardly Pierre Renoir. Although sloe-eyed, immaculately coiffed pre-war temptress Mireille Balin slinks through the narrative, her rather puzzling absence from the film's concluding scene is symptomatic of the film's rather casual attitude towards its characters.