Borsalino

Borsalino (1970) is a French-Italian crime film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Jacques Deray. The draw is simple: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon — the two defining faces of European cinema that decade — share the screen as a pair of small-time crooks in 1930s Marseilles who start brawling over a woman and end up building a criminal empire together.

Carbone and Spirito work their way up from the outer edges of organised crime — rigged horse races, fixed boxing bouts, odd jobs for the local bosses — until they decide they are done taking orders. What sets the film apart from harder-edged gangster pictures of the period is its tone: light, almost playful, dressed in sharp period tailoring and carried along by Claude Bolling's jazz score. Director Deray keeps the violence brisk and the banter breezy. Belmondo plays loose and reckless; Delon plays cool and controlled. The gap between them is where the comedy lives.

It is a rare gangster film where the friendship between the two leads feels more interesting than the bloodshed. Stream Borsalino (1970) online on iFILM.