Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, is one of the great prison escape films, and a profound meditation on freedom and confinement. It has us rooting--as never before--for the success of its protagonists, all convicts of varying degrees of toughness attempting a prison breakout. Becker's success at creating suspense is rooted in his philosophy of filmmaking: “In a true film,” he has stated, “everything must be foreseen; the smallest suspect detail destroys the value of the whole.” In Le Trou, he painstakingly establishes the contained world of four prisoners--and then adds a fifth. Suddenly, everything revolves around the newcomer: will he or won't he go along with the escape plan? In this film, perhaps more than any of this others (which include Casque d'Or, Goupi Mains-Rouges, and Rendezvous de Juillet), Becker has attempted what he might have called a “true” film; he achieves a totally engrossing tale through an extreme of realistic detail.
On the film's release, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, one of the founders of Cahiers du Cinema, wrote this impression:
“This escape seems impossible. It is nevertheless authentic and reconstituted with the utmost fidelity. In point of fact a more recent and more extraordinary escape, which just made the headlines, comes right in time to authenticate Becker's.
“But it is another form of authentification that Becker embeds in his escape: the prodigious truth of details. People have often gently mocked his manias, his infinite scruples when shooting...what some took to be a fault finds here its end, its triumph.
“Hardwood floorboards, grains of plaster, stones, cobblestones, bars, locks are to be lifted, scratched, worked on, unsealed, sawed, forced open without cheating, without ellipsis, without tricks, without easy dissolves.
“And each time, the work, the effort of man is to be shown ‘frontally.' Becker allows himself no facility. He runs the risk of boring, tiring or dissolving his film into ‘document'...but his success is complete; out of this extraordinary ‘analysis' is continually born the rhythm, the anxiety, the suspense, the passion.
“His ‘escape' is a kind of being itself, of which he lovingly tells us the growth and bloom. Under the magnifying glass of the entomologist that he indeed was lives a strange creature, as fascinating as the monster of the ‘Metamorphosis,' the strange body of which gradually spreads out...in this strange universe, deprived of the light of day, beneath the prison, like a labyrinth.” (translated for PFA by Paul Fonteyn)

Note: Le Trou repeated July 2.