Marcel Bozzuffi spent thirty years being the man the hero has to get past: hitmen, gangsters, policemen, played with a rasp and a stare and no wasted movement. He was rarely the lead, and the films were often better for having him in the way.
Fi1m perspective
The chase in The French Connection (1971) is remembered for the car and the train, but a chase needs someone worth chasing, and Marcel Bozzuffi's Pierre Nicoli is exactly that. Balding, hoarse and unhurried, he spends the film making the hitman quietly frightening; we found him more alarming standing still than most actors manage with a gun raised, because he never looks as if he is in any hurry to use it. He began as a stunt performer and was still taking his own falls here, and it shows in how he moves: like a man, not like a man being doubled. William Friedkin's film belongs to Gene Hackman, whose Doyle we found frighteningly plausible in his obsession, but Bozzuffi is the reason the chasing matters.
He had been that man for fifteen years already. He came into French cinema through the back door in the mid-1950s, uncredited, hitting people and being hit, and worked his way up to named gangsters, most visibly as Jo Ricci in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), alongside Lino Ventura. Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) gave him Vago, an assassin whose sexuality the film treats as one more thing he is concealing, and it is the part that told audiences outside France he could do more than glower. He also directed and co-wrote one feature, L'Américain (1969), and worked twice with Françoise Fabian, once as her director.
After Friedkin the directors got grander even if the parts did not. Robert Altman put him in Images (1972) as René, a long way from a gun. Michelangelo Antonioni gave him Mario in Identification of a Woman (1982). He kept working in France and Italy, and lent his voice to French dubbing, which tells you how distinctive the voice was. But the French have a phrase for what he mostly remained, troisième couteau, the third knife: the supporting heavy who exists so the star has someone to face. Films such as March or Die (1977) used him for that and nothing more.
That is a limit, and he does not seem to have fought it. What he did inside it was precise. He never raised the rasp when a look would do, and he moved like someone who knew where the exits were. Start with the chase, and this time watch the man being chased rather than the man doing the chasing. Then find Z, where he is given something to hide and hides it well.
Biography
Marcel Bozzuffi was a French actor. He played Pierre Nicoli in The French Connection (1971) and appeared in Z (1969) as Vago, Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) as Jo Ricci and Images (1972) as René.
He began his career performing stunts in France and later directed films, including L'Américain (1969). He also provided dubbed voices for actors including Charles Bronson and Paul Newman.
Bozzuffi was married to actress Françoise Fabian.
