Gu needs money, so he agrees to participate in the armed robbery of a truck loaded with platinum. His three partners in the crime are Paul (Raymond Pellegrin), a sophisticated gangster, Pascal (Pascal Léonetti), and smug young sniper Antoine (Denis Manuel). Two cops are murdered, and the crime, while successfully executed, draws the interest of all-knowing Police Commissioner Blot (Paul Meurisse).
Blot learns where Gu is, and arranges for his kidnapping by undercover police. Gu thinks the cops are gangsters, and names Paul as his partner in the heist. Paul is also arrested, and both are tortured, though they do not reveal the names of others involved in the heist.
Gu escapes police custody. Paul is freed for a lack of evidence. Gu's partners are angry at Gu, and want him killed. But Gu learns their hideout, and confronts the three of them alone in a final shootout.
How others will see it. Although fairly obscure in the U.S., Second Wind was a commercial smash in its home market of France, where it is known under its original title Le deuxiéme souffle. The film preceded the 1976 advent of the César Awards, and it was ignored by both the Oscars and BAFTA. Today, though, it has a high user rating of 7.9 out of 10, and a respectable 7K user votes, given that it is a black-and-white foreign language movie made six decades ago.
The user reviews make note of the films long running time (for 1966): two and a half hours. This is fine for character development, according to the many admirers of the movie. But it is too long for some.
How I felt about it. Director Jean-Pierre Melville died at the young age of 55, but not before making a number of plotty, interesting crime dramas. They tend to be well cast, and if a film was successful, he would often use the same leads again in a subsequent film. For example, the two leads, Ventura and Meurisse, also appeared in the Melville film Army of Shadows (1969), probably his best work.
Melville has been called sexist, since his films are dominated by males on one side or the other of the law. In the present movie, practically the entire cast is male except for Manouche, who is present primarily as a love interest for Gu. This doesn't bother me much. It is easy to believe that hoods are sexist, and wish to keep their women in the dark about their criminal activities, if only to keep them from interfering.
That's not to say that Second Wind is perfect. Much is made of a "confession" by Inspector Fardiano (Paul Frankeur) that he tricked and tortured Gu, but that confession was written under gunpoint, moments before he was murdered. The confession is meaningless under such circumstances; Fardiano was merely dictating what Gu directed him to write.
Blot seems to have a supernatural presence in this movie. The gangsters know, and outright fear, him: "Blot is on the case." Nonetheless, it is unlikely that Blot would be so foolish as to be the first to reach Gu after his shootout, given that Gu is armed and desperate. Blot is lucky he doesn't get his head blown off.
One thing I like about Second Wind is that the worst characters are killed off. This was obligatory during the era of the Production Code in Hollywood, but it still seems a good rule to follow regardless. As in Quentin Tarantino's best movies, the bad guys get what is coming to them, sometimes from the law, and sometimes from fellow criminals.