Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Greed in the Sun Blu-ray Movie Review

'Greed' is good.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 1, 2012

Is there a method to Olive Films’ madness? Lovers of the sometimes obscure catalog title have no doubt noticed that Olive has embarked on one of the most ambitious release schedules of any supposedly “small” label, offering a multitude of unusual offerings every month, many of which diehard fans no doubt thought would never be released on DVD, let alone Blu-ray. These films are incredibly disparate in style, genre and even era, embracing everything from classic Max Ophüls (Letter from an Unknown Woman) to early John Wayne (Overland Stage Raiders) to something akin to Japanese new wave (Love Exposure). With such an exciting if sometimes bewildering array of titles (and those three are just the tip of Olive’s iceberg—look here), Olive’s strategy may not be instantly discernable, but they are certainly carving out an extremely wide swath that lovers of lesser known films should appreciate. This month’s release schedule is no exception, though a case could be made that there’s an odd sort of logic running through at least some of the titles Olive is bringing out. If you take the barren desert setting and scenarist (Michel Audiard) of Taxi for Tobruk and combine it with both the heist scenario and at least a couple of the stars of The Brain, you might end up with something like the 1964 French feature Greed in the Sun.

The Twilight Zone used to air in reruns in the afternoon when I was growing up, and it became “must see tv” for me every day after I got home from school. One of the episodes that made the biggest impact on my young mind was a great outing called “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” which saw a group of men engineering a heist of gold bullion and then putting themselves in suspended animation for 100 years, waking up in the future and then getting caught up in a sort of internecine battle as they struggled to find civilization in a barren desert wasteland. (The “twist” at the end of this episode is easily one of the best Twilight Zone about faces ever in the long history of that usually surprising series.) There’s a certain similar element at play in Greed in the Sun, as a bunch of avaricious no-goodniks vie with each other for control of what seems now like a relatively paltry sum ($100,000, which in French is “cent mille dollars”, part of the original title Cent Mille Dollars Au Soleil).

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Rocco, a rakish rogue who works for a Moroccan transport company owned and operated by a character named Castigliano played by none other than Goldfinger himself, Gert Fröbe (billed as Froebe in the film). This diabetic and dyspeptic trucking magnate has just bought a beautiful new semi, which Rocco and other employees are ogling, wondering which driver will be appointed to helm it. It turns out none of the regular employees are in the running, and indeed a newcomer named Steiner (Reginald Kernan) lands the job, even though it’s quite obvious his real name isn’t Steiner and he’s hiding some sort of skeleton in his closet.

Rocco catches wind that the load on this truck (which is never really identified) is worth a cool hundred grand, and he tricks Steiner into thinking the call time to take the truck has been switched later the next morning. In the meantime, Rocco of course takes off with the truck, enlisting the aid of his lovely girlfriend Pepa (Andréa Parisy). Castigliano nearly blows a gasket when he finds out, and enlists Rocco’s friend and fellow trucking employee Marec (Lino Ventura) to track the rascal down. Steiner intercepts Marec and pleads with him to let him help, which Marec agrees to do. The bulk of the film then becomes a raucous and at times quite funny cat and mouse game as Rocco attempts to get the good delivered and the cash collected before he’s stopped.

As with Taxi for Tobruk, this is an often surprisingly scenic film, despite it being placed in a vast and barren desert. The shots of various Moroccan towns and oases along the way add a really exotic flavor to the proceedings and help to firmly establish the unusual setting. There are also some fantastic little set pieces scattered throughout this perhaps slightly overlong film. During the truck chase, Rocco attempts to disable Marec and Steiner’s truck by making all sorts of debris fall on them on a long and twisting mountain pass that looks like something out of a desert version of Ice Road Truckers. Later in the film’s climax Rocco and Marec engage in a little hand to hand combat in a scenic Moroccan courtyard, a fight which director Henri Verneuil stages rather unusually, with lots of really wide shots that actually lend the battle a cartoonish aspect, perfectly in keeping with the film’s often tongue in cheek ambience.

There are times when Greed in the Sun is weirdly reminiscent of the great Henri-George Clouzot film The Wages of Fear, what with its desperate characters transporting a valuable commodity across an impenetrable landscape. Greed in the Sun is considerably more comic of course and it rather oddly at times plays almost like a humorous Western (listen to the sound opening the film, which is actually truck tires traversing a sandy road, but which sounds incredibly like horses’ hooves). If Greed in the Sun had been a Western however, there would have been no white hats and black hats. This is an outing that despite its blanched desert setting plays out in deliberately ambiguous shades of gray.

Greed in the Sun Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Greed in the Sun is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This sort of Gaumont sibling to Taxi for Tobruk has much the same image quality as that release, although grain is somewhat more evident throughout Greed in the Sun, even without opticals. The image offers really nice gradation in gray scale, with excellently crisp whites and (the few times they actually appear) solid blacks. There are no noticeable stability problems even when settings include heavily patterned Arabesques, as in some of the Moroccan village scenes. There are some slight contrast fluctuations throughout the film and the elements do show some very minor age related damage along the way, but overall this is yet another great looking Olive release that has not been artificially tampered with in any noticeable way.

Greed in the Sun Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Greed in the Sun's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track does just fine with regard to the dialogue, but there's some quite noticeable distortion in some of the music, most notably at the head of the film when the Gaumont fanfare is pretty badly wobbly and Georges Delerue's opening theme sounds awfully tinny, especially in the midrange. Things get appreciably better as the film goes on (though part of that is due to a relative paucity of underscore in any case). Fidelity is fine if not overwhelming, and aside from the passing distortion there's no other egregious damage to report.

Greed in the Sun Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Special Feature (HD; 3:59) is an extended trailer for the film.

Greed in the Sun Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Greed in the Sun is another unexpected choice from Olive Films, but it should be enjoyed by anyone who likes snappily written dialogue, exotic locations and a couple of very exciting set pieces. The film is wonderfully cast as well, with Belmondo absolutely perfect in yet another ne'er-do-well role to which he seemed so well suited. The slow unfolding of several little twists as the film moves along keeps things from becoming too predictable, and while it's at least debatable that the film would have been better had it been judiciously trimmed by twenty or so minutes (it comes in at a little over two hours), it also has to be stated quite firmly that things are never boring even as they stand. Verneuil is an oddly underappreciated director stateside, even though his approach is quite American, with dry humor and great action commingling in a sort of proto-arch manner. This may in fact not be Verneuil's finest turn (it would be great so see some of his collaborations with Jean Gabin get released by Olive), but it's a brisk and very entertaining film that is a joy to see on Blu-ray. Recommended.