Claude Otan-Lara, La Traversée de Paris (1956) The action takes place in Paris during the WWII. Former taxi driver, now unemployed Marcel Martin (Bourville), earns a living by delivering smuggled pork from one dealer to another, usually with the help of a partner, since the carcass of a pig in four suitcases alone can not deliver. But once his partner was arrested, and the meat must be carried. And Martin makes a strange at first glance decision to take on a partner completely unexpectedly appeared in the bistro stranger. Then he will meet him, find out that his name is Grangel (Jean Gabin), together they will go to Jambier (Louis de Funes), after some excesses, as a result of which Grangel will make the greedy Jambier pay him much more than he was going to. Grangel behaves freely, sometimes even aggressively, clearly having fun with what is happening. That’s how they’ll travel across Paris with these suitcases, risking being caught by patrols of their own and those of Germany. On the way, it turns out that Grangel is a popular and quite well-off artist, he even returns to Martin the money he knocked out of Jambier, but in the end they are still arrested, and by the stupidity of Martin himself and the one to whom they were carrying this meat, if Martin did not yell, and he quickly opened the door, everything would have been fine. They were taken to the German commandant's office, located in a luxury hotel, and there it turned out that the German major, who runs everything there, knows Granzhil as an artist, Grangel does not abandon Martin, posing as his assistant and secretary, and everything seemed to be going to be released, but then a courier arrives, notifying the major that somewhere there was killed a German colonel, all the arrested French are put in a truck that takes them to an unknown destination, most likely to prison, but Grangel is still released at the last moment. We might have thought Martin was shot, but at the end of the day, Grangel and Martin meet at the train station by accident after the war, Grangel goes somewhere, Martin works as a porter and still carries other people's suitcases.
The film is quite good, but I think that it is not designed for an international, but for a French audience, which, I must say, was not very enthusiastic. They often had a period of occupation in the movies was usually shown as a heroic struggle of the Resistance, and here some underground meat dealers, some smuggling during the absence of food. At first, Marcel Eme, the author of the story on which the film was staged, was categorically against the approval of Bourville for the main role, but then he was forced to admit that he was wrong, Bourville coped with it perfectly. There is no need to talk about Gaben, he is always good.