HE director Jacques Becker once told an interviewer, "I am French; I make films about French people; I look at French people; I am interested in French people." Among the 13 features he made in his too-brief career — he died in 1960, at 53 — none provides more conclusive proof of that defiant Frenchness than the elegant 1954 gangster movie "Touchez pas au Grisbi" ("Don't Touch the Loot"), which will play for two weeks at Film Forum beginning Friday. That picture (now in a new, and newly subtitled, print) is among the very few French movies about the criminal class in which neither the characters nor the filmmakers are afflicted by the delusion that they are Americans. In "Touchez pas au Grisbi," real men eat patι.

That may sound like an insignificant detail, but in Jacques Becker's work the details are everything. Max (Jean Gabin), the movie's middle-aged hero, is a man who enjoys his creature comforts — good food, fine wine, beautiful women, freshly laundered pajamas — and, in stark contrast to the striving, driven gangsters of the Depression-era American films that set the standards for the genre, he enjoys them entirely for their own sake, not as symbols of his status as a grand fromage in the underworld. Max doesn't need to prove to anyone that he has arrived; as Gabin plays him, he looks as if he has always been exactly where he is, as solid and as apparently immutable as a paving stone in the Place Pigalle.

Our Scarfaces and our Little Caesars never had the enviable serenity of this Parisian hood — the sense of being totally at ease in their own skins. Max is an unambiguously tough guy, but he moves at his own stately, unhurried pace. The American gangster, feral and insecure, has traditionally been presented on screen as a force of nature. The supremely self-confident hero of "Touchez pas au Grisbi" is something different: he's a force of culture.

Which is what makes him interesting to Jacques Becker, whose diverse films are united only by their fascination with the minutest particulars of people's — French people's — lives. He once described himself as "a bit of an entomologist," and the specimens he examined on film include a rural family ("Goupi Mains Rouges," 1943), a young working-class couple in Paris ("Antoine et Antoinette," 1947), Left Bank jazz fans ("Rendez-vous de Juillet," 1949), turn-of-the-century thugs and the women who love them ("Casque d'Or," 1952), struggling artists ("Montparnasse 19," 1958) and five prisoners trying to tunnel out of jail ("Le Trou," 1960). The variety of Becker's subjects makes his work a little elusive, resistant to definition. Franηois Truffaut, in fact, felt compelled to begin his laudatory Cahiers du Cinιma review of "Grisbi" with a string of negatives. "There are no theories in circulation about Jacques Becker," he wrote, "no scholarly analyses, no theses. Neither he nor his work encourages commentary, and so much the better for that. The truth is that Becker has no intention of mystifying or demystifying anyone; his films are neither statements nor indictments."

The instructive, and kind of amusing, thing about that passage is that Truffaut seems to be describing precisely the sort of filmmaker he and his auteurist colleagues militantly disapproved of, like John Huston or William Wyler: a versatile director without an easily identifiable style. But Huston and Wyler were American, and the young French critics, who would a few years later form the nucleus of the New Wave, looked to our films for myth, for intimations of the almost mystical power they attributed to cinema. The Cahiers gang looked to French films, however, for ways of capturing the real circumstances of life — of their own, French, lives — on the screen. And Jacques Becker put as much specific French reality in his films as anyone save his great mentor, Jean Renoir (who, in 1954, had not made a movie in his native country in 15 years). Truffaut and his colleagues, that is, could not evaluate an American movie by its fidelity to lived experience, but they did judge the films of their compatriots that way; and their judgment was that Becker was, almost alone among the filmmakers of his generation, an honest man.

They were right. It's a shame that Becker's pictures aren't better known in the United States; honesty isn't in such long supply among our auteurs either. Most of his films are currently unavailable on video or DVD — including even the luminous "Casque d'Or," which made a star of Simone Signoret. A couple of years ago, Criterion issued a ravishing DVD of "Le Trou" — a movie that is, improbably, as entertaining as it is uncompromising — but it failed to generate a measurable wave of Beckermania. Maybe "Grisbi" will do the trick for Becker, as the revival of "Bob le Flambeur" (1955) in the 80's did for Jean-Pierre Melville.

But maybe not. "Bob le Flambeur" is, in a peculiar way, far more accessible to American audiences than "Grisbi," both because Melville's loose, shaggy-dog style is more familiar — it prefigures the anything-goes approach of the New Wave — and because his middle-aged gangsters are so obviously derived from American models. Like the Bogie-worshipping young thug incarnated by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1959), and most French gangsters since, they appear to be playing at cops and robbers. They're more farceurs than criminals — gangsters in quotation marks.

There are no quotation marks around Becker's Max, or any of his cronies, enemies or floozies (one of the latter, by the way, is embodied by the 26-year-old Jeanne Moreau). The hero's patι-eating, his white-wine-swilling, his susceptibility to the ooh-la-la charms of beady-eyed chorus girls, mark him as seriously French, and therefore undismissible as a mere Cagney wannabe. And the movie's style is free of gangster flash: it's as classic and as lived-in as Gabin's impeccable double-breasted suits. Becker doesn't try to wow the audience with set-pieces: he begins the story after the eponymous "grisbi" — 96 kilos of gold — has been stolen. Just try to imagine "Rififi" (which followed Becker's film by a year) without its signature heist.

Like Truffaut, I find myself characterizing Jacques Becker's work by what it's not — which is, I suppose, a way of saying that "Touchez pas au Grisbi" is, despite the calmness of its manner, consistently surprising. Or perhaps I should say, because of that mysterious calm, which Becker shares with his hero. The movie is, in every sense, a celebration of savoir-faire, and that's an uncommon thing for a gangster movie — even a French gangster movie — to be. In "Touchez pas au Grisbi," the criminal life is, like every other sort of life put under the microscope by Becker, just a life, defined by the specific pleasures of a favorite restaurant, a favorite song, a friend or two.

Truffaut saw "Grisbi" as "a film about being 50," and the picture, nearing that milestone itself, has aged remarkably well. There are more powerful gangster movies than this, but I don't know of one with a more complex or a more delicate bouquet.  

Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies."