Band of Outsiders

No one’s dancing the Madison in Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold (1958). Godard traded her wind-smacked Pasadena and causeless strivers for the foggy, fluvial Paris suburbs and the existential poetry of “trembling” youth. But he admires the novel’s precise, pitiless prose in countless small ways in his tale of two aspiring thugs, Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur), who are drawn to the stylized violence of bit players in film noir and the incipient corruptibility of a would-be heroine, fellow night-school student Odile (Anna Karina). They set out to burglarize the villa where Odile works, and reality arrives like a police siren.