Farewell, Friend (1968)

☆ ☆ ☆

Farewell, Friend (1968) – J. Herman

A French heist film with Alain Delon and … Charles Bronson?!?  Intriguing, but actually more of a curiosity than a pleasure.  Somehow Delon and Bronson wind up locked in a polyester company’s basement trying all the possible combinations to a safe that contains 200 million francs.  I guess this might have some parallels to our experience of quarantine right now! But it leads to a bare-chested punch-out between the two leads (but really their stage fighting is pretty crap – Eastwood did better with that orangutan).  The film might work better if the pace weren’t so leisurely but I guess we are supposed to enjoy the repartee between the two leads (which might work better if Bronson weren’t dubbed into French).  Eventually we get to the requisite plot twists which come out of the blue (or is that bleu?) and potentially involve some misogyny which unfortunately might be par for the course in this sort of 1968 manly movie (not denying its underlying homoerotic subtext). Look elsewhere (e.g., the films of Jean-Pierre Melville) for vintage Delon (not sure what to say about Bronson, the most famous Lithuanian – uh, Once Upon a Time in the West?).