La horse

Weak direction, sloppy photography, a script with more holes than Swiss cheese, and some rampant animal cruelty all make LA HORSE a mediocre and immediately forgettable flick.

An aging Gabin - solid performance, full of menacing looks - runs his farm and family with a shotgun and he thinks nothing of blasting away the gang of drug runners, and he keeps mum to police, who - thankfully - are not very persistent in their investigation.

Happy ending after plenty of corpses. Buy it at your peril!

Wonderful film with wonderful actors and great story plus Gabin is the greatest actor I dont understand some rather low scoring and sorry its not Rambo but Hollywood has copied many ideas from European films

A movie about a very simple but strong-minded man. Gabin is excellent in the lead role, as your typical annoyed, but sort of solemn old man who only cares about his duty to protect his family. The movie really does a great job developing and visually presenting his relationship with his children and grandchildren, he's in charge, and whatever he says, goes.

I love when a character can rule and command people simply through his mannerisms and the way he presents himself. Despite having decades on most of his family, and even the drug smugglers he finds himself in battle with, he always manages to be intimidating to them through sheer resilience and presence.

The way the movie is structured is handled very well, we start out with a crime thriller-esque plot where he takes turns fighting this drug smuggling gang, and the movie switches gears and sort of becomes a legal or investigative movie where we see how his family has been instructed to act in the face of law enforcement (don't say anything). And despite having those elements, the movie still manages to have a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes very dark, but mostly just situational humor that's very well done. And while it manages to be tense throughout, the comedy is wonderfully woven in, where it never feels phony or stale.

In a lot of ways, this film feels almost like an old-timey Western, and John Wayne being in Jean Gabin's role wouldn't be that shocking, but what this movie does differently is that it takes the 70s era realism and adds it to a very Western-esque scenario and plot to create something that is incredibly engaging. And like many Westerns, I really loved how the movie was presented and framed in its cinematography, with lots of wide shots with beautiful blocking, through simplicity. There's a shot after the drug smugglers attack his cows with their truck, and at the end of that scene is a beautiful shot of a dead cow in the foreground and the truck leaving in the background, showing the damage they left behind.

After watching a lot of Hollywood or American movies recently, I've noticed that I've grown tired of the lack of genuine nature and artificiality in these movies. This is why watching this movie was so refreshing, every element of this movie feels real and genuine, and the disturbing stuff that happens is genuinely shocking because it looks and probably is, real.

This one was the first of a series of "rural" thrillers which began to appear in the first part of the seventies.We can also mention "la veuve Couderc" "les granges brûlées" and mainly "l'affaire Dominici",a true story which also featured Gabin,in a part very similar to the one he played in "la horse" .

The clannishness in a rural milieu was not new in 1971: Becker's great "Goupi Mains Rouges" is the granddaddy of "la horse" .Granier-Deferre was never looked upon as an auteur and however his movie has stood the test of time quite well.It's a short movie (about 85 min) and the audience is never bored.Gabin is excellent in this part of a grumpy die-hard farmer.He rules over his family and no one dares to contradict him.He lives in a world that no longer exists but he is not prepared to accept another one,so the others must follow.He never contradicts himself,and even if it's difficult to side with him,because taking the law into your hands is hard to swallow for a normal human being,one cannot deny Gabin's behavior its internal logic. The villains -traffickers in drugs- are cardboard characters but it does not matter,cause it's Gabin's one man show.When he learns his grandson is involved in this dirty business,he sees red: no one in his family has already been arrested ,and his family is sacred,the only way of getting out of this mess is striking back.

When he discovers his grandson, Marx Porel, has two hundred milion francs worth of heroin, Jean Gabin destroys it. Then the criminal for whom Porel has been holding it comes and demands the drugs and the man, and threaten his family and farm. Gabin shoots him, hides the body, sinks the crook's car in the swamp and sticks his grandson in the potato cellar. His cattle are stampeded and killed, his barn is burnt. Gabin gives his orders but no explanation to his family and workers, despite the police taking an interest.

This being a Gabin film, I was never in any doubt as to how it would turn out. Indeed, the idea of a multi-billion dollar mob of criminals going against Gabin is soberly funny. Gabin is quite believable as the stiff-necked, autocratic proprietor of a family farm in Calvados, just as he is in everything.