Young Sinners (Les Tricheurs)

Mixing comedy with drama, Marcel Carné's 1958 film Young Sinners paints the manners and spirit of the young people of its day; Carné wrote the screenplay himself. The French-Italian production, titled Les Tricheurs in the original and Peccatori in blue-jeans in Italy, runs about 121 minutes.

The film follows the daily lives of a group of fairly well-off young Parisians at the end of the 1950s. They drift between the Left Bank around Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Right Bank of the 16th arrondissement. Carné made it after he had turned fifty, yet through its subject the film anticipates the New Wave. Pascale Petit and Jean-Paul Belmondo star, and the cast also includes Jacques Charrier, Laurent Terzieff, Pierre Brice, Dany Saval, Claude Giraud and Andréa Parisy. Of these young performers, Belmondo and Pierre Brice would become big stars in the following decade. Belmondo appears here in one of his earliest roles.

The film was a huge box-office success, selling nearly five million tickets in France, and in Italy it drew more than five million viewers in the 1958-1959 season. It received the Grand prix du cinéma français in the year of its release.