Even before the film gets underway, we've had... a Freudian scene of children playing in a French street (one boy slices open another's bag of marbles, which tumble down some steps), a shot of drum majorettes marching round a Canadian field, a full-blown homage to Sergio Leone, a couple of Lewis Carroll references, and some near-subliminal freeze-frames of dead children in black-and-white. And all this before the opening credits have finished.
"La course du lièvre..." is a film bristling with tantalising ideas, not all of which are fully resolved or explained. One major theme is that of childhood and games, though the point that René Clément seems to be making, that we are all just big children, is perhaps less interesting than the fun he has expressing it. At its simplest level, this is a slightly tongue-in-cheek Western-style caper movie; for much of the time we can even forget that we're in modern-day Montreal, as the long middle section in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's enigmatic "Froggy" is gradually accepted into Robert Ryan's gang is set in and around a backwoods cabin that wouldn't be out of place in a Peckinpah movie.
Though Trintignant and Ryan are never less than fascinating to watch, particularly in their scenes together as the power balance gradually shifts between them, this is one of those films (unlike Clément's "Plein soleil") where the whole really doesn't go beyond the sum of the parts. It's a film to enjoy for the intelligence and inventiveness of the script, and above all for the virtuosic flair of Clément's direction, particularly in the long chase sequence immediately following the credits, starting with Trintignant leaping off a moving train and ending with him pushing a man out of a moving car. The heist scene later on, involving a fire engine inside a skyscraper, is actually a little disappointing, the consequence perhaps of the director trying a little too hard to achieve a "wow" response.
Ryan, by the way, had such difficulty learning the French dialogue for this film, that Clément gave him gibberish lines to speak, just so that he could get the mouth movements right for later dubbing (Aldo Ray, on the other hand, learnt his lines phonetically). Watch out for Emmanuelle Béart's uncredited film début as "girl eating cake" during the opening sequence.
