After a year off working out what to do next, Jean-Paul Belmondo returned in 1968 with Ho! (sometimes called Ho! Criminal Face). Having been courted by Hollywood, he’d decided he wanted to stay in France and stick with what he was best at – films that emphasised a moody masculinity.
It’s got to be said straight up that Ho! isn’t very good, but it is very stylish and so is Belmondo. He plays François Holin (aka Ho), a former racing driver who is now a getaway driver for a mob. Ho was once a star but now he’s treated like an errand boy by the other guys in the gang. Secretly he yearns to be a gang leader on his own terms. And after the accidental killing of the gang’s actual boss, and an entirely fallacious newspaper article describing Ho as a cross between Al Capone and Arsène Lupin, Ho decides to seize his chance.
The original story was by José Giovanni, real name Joseph Damiani, a Nazi collaborator who extorted and murdered Jews in France and ended up after the war sentenced to death. His sentence reduced and eventually remitted by the French president, Damiani left jail in 1956, changed his name to Giovanni and wrote his first book, about his attempt to escape from prison by tunnelling into the sewers.
Le Trou eventually became a celebrated film by Jacques Becker and is a classic jailbreak movie, possibly the classic jailbreak movie. Other books by Giovanni, like Classe tous risques and Le deuxième souffle also became hit movies, by Claude Sautet and Jean-Pierre Melville respectively.
All feature tough, glamourised versions of Damiani himself – no mention of the Nazis – and it’s tempting to see Belmondo’s Ho as another iteration of Damiani’s self-idealisation. Ho winds up shot in the leg and bleeding heavily, as did Damiani while on his torturing/killing spree.
Damiani/Giovanni didn’t like the film. It’s easy to see why. Ho’s motivation is confused and confusing. After the Lupin/Capone comparisons are made in the newspapers, Ho pins up the coverage he’s getting on the walls of his hideout. Exuding a new-found, or refound, self-confidence, he recruits some car thieves to be his own gang. He appears to have started believing his own publicity, and it’s the making of him. And yet at the same time Ho is contacting the journalist who wrote the story and setting him straight, giving him the true version of events, a plot strand that’s flatly contradictory to the rest of the plot and psychologically baffling.
Ho and the old gang, Ho and the new gang, Ho and his model girlfriend’s on/off relationship, Ho and the cop on his tail, Ho and the journalist, Ho’s past as a racing driver, there are also so many competing stories being told that all get short measures. Most bizarrely of all is the strange interlude when Ho winds up in prison for a while on suspicion of being a murderous gangster and then breaks free by impersonating the tramp with whom he shares a cell, a novel scenario that might have been a film in its own right.
François de Roubaix’s jaunty score doesn’t help at all and is entirely wrong. This isn’t a comedy. Or maybe it is and it’s just not a very funny one.
Joanna Shimkus (the model girlfriend), Paul Crauchet (the journalist), André Weber (the tramp), Alain Mottet (the cop) all act as if they are in a coherent movie, which this really isn’t, Robert Enrico’s direction is fluid and smart and the production design speaks of the film this should have been. But Lucienne Hamon and Pierre Pelegri have made a hash of adapting Giovanni/Damiani’s novel, and there’s nothing anyone can really do about that except continue as if everything is fine, nothing to see here.
Ho! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
