Honor Among Thieves

The Night Watch. "I feel fine for the first time in my life," says the baby-faced young jailbird, Gaspard. "It is wonderful to be with men like you." The men it is wonderful to be with are four fellow inmates at Paris' sprawling La Sante prison. They eye Gaspard with suspicion. He seems too soft, too ready to please. He is accused of attempting to kill the wife who supported him while he dallied with her teenage sister. Can this fancy boy be trusted? His cell mates decide to risk it, and cut Gaspard in on their plan to dig their way to freedom.

Ingeniously improvising, the prisoners of La Sante rig up dummies with movable limbs to fill their places at lights-out. One man stands watch at the cell door with a periscope fashioned from a toothbrush and a shard of mirror. A piece of a metal bunk serves as a digging tool. Two stolen medicine bottles filled with sand make an hourglass to time the long, seemingly hopeless task of chipping through concrete sewer walls and treacherous rock. On the afternoon of the last day before the escape, Gaspard is suddenly called to the warden's office. Two hours later he returns to the cells, insisting he has said nothing to betray his comrades, and the drama hurtles toward a shock climax that suddenly becomes less a saga of physical endurance than a test of one man's moral strength.

The last film of French Director Jacques Becker, who died shortly after completing it in 1960, Night Watch engages interest on several levels. As a straight thriller, it is taut, bone-bare, agonizingly suspenseful, and flawlessly acted by its leading players, all nonprofessionals (except Mark Michel as Gaspard). As a movie about prison life, it is authentic; La Sante's guards are not brutes, they are merely inhumanly efficient machines, trained to perform surgery on the contents of a food parcel, to count skulls in the numbered cubicles where prisoners contemplate their anonymity. As a meaningful human drama, it has a point of view. Night Watch deepens the adventure of an underground escape route by saying that a man can scrape, scratch, hammer and claw his way to freedom from everything but himself.

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