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The film’s bang-bang opening invites the adjective “breathless” and indeed “Classe” has an actual relationship to Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature: Afraid to fetch Abel when he holes up in Nice, his old gang dispatches Eric Stark, a freelance criminal played by the “Breathless” lead Jean-Paul Belmondo.

In September 2019, he attended the funeral of his friend and fellow star Jean-Paul Belmondo in Paris.

The film version, co-written by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola and released in 1966, featured an enormous international cast, including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Orson Welles, Anthony Perkins and Gert Fröbe.

These included the 1950s gems “Charlotte and Veronique, or All the Boys Are Called Patrick” and “Charlotte and Her Jules,” two pre-“Breathless” shorts, the latter featuring Belmondo; and “A Story of Water” from 1958, co-directed with Francois Truffaut.

I became disoriented early on, at the famous jump-cut scene at the end of the opening sequence, when Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character, Michel, shoots the cop.