Second Wind 4K 1966 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Hardened gangster Gus, who escaped from prison after serving 16 years, returns to Marseille to take revenge on crime boss Joe Ricci, who has double-crossed him twice. He needs money to flee the country, and just then, his former accomplices offer him a lucrative job—to kill the armored car guards transporting platinum bars worth a billion francs.

Review 4K Movie

I don’t like very long movies. This one runs two and a half hours. But once I was immersed in the exquisitely crafted atmosphere of French film noir, I didn’t fully appreciate the film’s greatness until after I’d seen it.

The film adaptation of the novel of the same name by French writer José (Jose) Giovanni turned out to be very faithful to the source material. We follow a few days in the life of Gus, a gangster who has escaped from prison and is trying to lie low. He is helped in this by his beloved, nicknamed “Manouche”—a Gypsy woman. However, when Gus’s old friends offer him a chance to take part in a heist on an armored truck, he agrees, since he needs the money to flee abroad.

Hot on the heels of the gangsters is the cunning and cold-blooded Commissioner Blo, who follows the “divide and conquer” principle in his work. For him, hunting down gangsters is like a hunt.

In addition to the authentic acting, the film stands out for its direction and cinematography. But the most important thing about it, in my opinion, is the atmosphere of the criminal underworld, which also has its own rules, its own good and evil.

There is neither a moral lesson nor a conclusion in this story. This is primarily due to the personality of the author of the original source material—Jose Giovanni. And so, a few words about him. Jose Giovanni was born in Paris in 1923 to a Corsican family. Despite receiving an excellent education, before the war he worked at low-paying jobs: dishwasher, lumberjack, and waiter. He participated in the Resistance. After the war, he joined a Corsican gang. He was captured during one of their raids, which involved a shootout, and sentenced to death. Giovanni awaited execution for several months, but his sentence was commuted to 10 years of hard labor. Immediately after his release, José wrote his first novel, "The Hole", about his attempt to escape from prison.

In 1986, a new trial was held regarding the 1945 case. Following the trial, the writer was fully exonerated.