Lino, José, Claude. Meet the three men, all dead now, who together made Classe Tous Risques; for my money, the greatest of all French gangster movies.

José Giovanni was on death row in Paris in the mid-50s, due to be guillotined for abetting a robbery that left three dead. After a failed escape attempt, he turned the experience into his first novel Le Trou (The Hole, 1957), whose literary success secured his pardon and release. It was filmed by Jacques Becker in 1960.

During his incarceration, Giovanni had one conversation – "perhaps thirty sentences" – with Abel Damos, a vicious gangster associated with the collaborationist Bonny-Lafont gang during the occupation. He was awaiting a death sentence passed in absentia during years spent as a fugitive in Italy with his wife and infant sons in tow. The notion of a bad man, doomed, trying to do right by his children, inspired Giovanni's second novel Classe Tous Risques.

It was this book which caught the attention of Claude Sautet, a busy assistant director who had just completed Lino Ventura's latest gangster movie, The Beast Is Loose, after the original director quit. Ventura snatched the lead (renamed Abel Davos), hired Giovanni for dialogue and put Sautet behind the camera for the first time, resulting in a richly poetic and confident debut (Sautet was French cinema's secret weapon for thirty years, a script doctor with a razor-sharp feel for problems, pacing and longueurs). Classe Tous Risques singlehandedly put muscle, sinew, soul and brains back into the French gangster movie. From its opening broad-daylight robbery in Milan to its bloody denouement in Paris, Sautet never once slips up, resisting all sentiment, and remaking gangster dialogue (thanks to Giovanni). He also has an eye for faces: apart from giving Jean-Paul Belmondo one of his first roles, check out Davos's super-tough partner in the opening heist, played by Stan Krol, one of Giovanni's old cellmates.

Lino Ventura was the man who made it all happen. Italian-born, a wrestler as a youth, a bison of a man possessed of a bashed-in face of surprising beauty and soulfulness, Ventura is, for me, the French Gangster – as Tragic Hero, naturellement – distilled to its quintessence. Ventura's physical grace and economy of gesture make his violent outbursts truly memorable; at one point he slaps a large milk-jug across a whole room, where, in a characteristic Sautet touch, it smashes a wall-mirror framing his duplicitous former associates (I'll leave you to savour for yourselves one of the greatest face-slaps in movie history).

Classe Tous Risques appeared a month after Breathless in 1960, and was swamped by it, becoming a supposedly obsolete obscurity almost immediately. Its re-release offers you the chance to acquaint yourselves with the remarkable lives and careers of the three men who created it. Don't miss it.