Pickpocket (1959) in Color — Starring Martin LaSalle & Marika Green

Pickpocket (1959) — Buy This Classic in Color

Pickpocket is a 1959 French crime drama directed by Robert Bresson and starring Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri, Dolly Scal and Pierre Leymarie. Spare, precise and quietly devastating, it follows a young man who drifts into the world of professional theft and finds that the discipline of the pickpocket’s craft becomes a substitute for the human connection he cannot make. Bresson strips the film down to gestures, hands and glances, turning a simple story of crime into one of the most spiritually searching films ever made. Own this classic movie in color as a DRM-free MP4 digital download for just €15.00.

Plot Summary

Michel is a young man living in Paris with almost no money and no clear direction. He spends his days in cheap rooms, borrowing from people who can barely afford to help him, and drifting through the streets with the flat, watchful expression of someone who has stopped expecting much from life. When he attends the races, he is less interested in the horses than in the crowd — the wallets, the hands, the small careless movements of people who assume they are safe.

It is at the track that Michel first tries to steal. He takes money from a woman’s purse, and although he is caught, the experience does not shame him the way it should. Instead it awakens something. He begins to think of theft not as a crime of desperation but as a discipline, a skill that a certain kind of superior man might legitimately practise. He writes out these ideas in a notebook, arguing that the exceptional individual stands outside ordinary morality — an argument he uses to justify what he already wants to do.

Michel falls in with a circle of professional thieves who recognise his unusual hands and his nerve. Under their guidance he learns the trade properly: the timing, the misdirection, the way a group of pickpockets can work a crowd as a single organism. Bresson films these sequences with extraordinary precision, showing the mechanics of the theft in close detail — fingers, coat lapels, folded newspapers, the moment of contact and release. The craft is beautiful, and that beauty is exactly the problem.

Meanwhile, Michel’s ordinary life continues to fray. His mother is ill, and he is too proud and too distant to care for her properly. Jeanne, a young woman who lives nearby and helps look after his mother, keeps reaching out to him with a patience he does not deserve. He is drawn to her and repelled by the closeness she offers, and he keeps choosing the clean, solitary thrill of the theft over the messy obligations of being loved.

The police close in. A detective who has been watching Michel confronts him and lays out the case against him, and Michel is arrested. In prison he is stripped of everything that made his philosophy feel plausible — the movement, the crowds, the anonymity, the skill. What is left is a man alone with himself, and the film turns its attention to the question it has been building toward from the first frame: whether a person this closed off can ever be reached, and what it would take to open him.

Cast & Crew

Director: Robert Bresson
Stars: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri, Dolly Scal, Pierre Leymarie

Why Buy This Classic in Color?

Robert Bresson made Pickpocket in austere black and white, and the colourised edition opens up a Paris that the original deliberately kept grey. The racetrack crowds, the cramped rented rooms, the worn overcoats and the plain mid-century interiors all gain a period-accurate warmth that makes the world Michel moves through feel lived-in rather than abstract. Skin tones in close-up carry more of the film’s emotional weight, which matters enormously in a movie built almost entirely on faces and hands. The colourised restoration also clarifies the geography of the celebrated pickpocketing sequences: the separation between the thieves and their marks, the texture of the clothing they work through, the small visual signals that make the choreography legible. None of this softens Bresson’s severity — the film remains as spare and as demanding as ever — but it gives modern viewers a more immediate grip on the physical reality of the story. If you have only seen Pickpocket in its original monochrome, this is a genuinely different way to watch it. Buy the DRM-free MP4 download today for €15.00 and start watching in minutes.

Historical Significance

Pickpocket arrived in 1959, at the height of the French New Wave, and it stood deliberately apart from it. Where Truffaut and Godard were loose, referential and restless, Bresson was exact, restrained and uninterested in cinematic quotation. He worked with non-professional performers, rehearsed them into flat, unemphatic delivery, and refused the theatrical conventions of screen acting. Martin LaSalle, in the lead, was not a trained actor in the usual sense, and Marika Green was similarly cast against type. The result is a film that feels less performed than observed, and that quality has kept it alive for more than six decades.

The film’s reputation grew steadily rather than immediately. Critics came to regard it as one of Bresson’s central works, alongside Diary of a Country Priest and Au Hasard Balthazar, and its influence on later filmmakers is difficult to overstate. Paul Schrader drew directly on it for American Gigolo, and the film’s closing passage has been cited by writers and directors as one of the great endings in cinema. Its treatment of crime as a form of spiritual discipline — the idea that a man might try to save himself through the very act that damns him — remains unusual and unsettling.

Bresson himself is one of the most imitated and least matched directors in film history. His theory of the “model” rather than the actor, his rejection of psychological performance, and his insistence on the autonomy of sound and image have shaped generations of filmmakers who work in a quieter register. Pickpocket is the most accessible entry point into that body of work: short, tightly plotted, and driven by a genuine suspense that never depends on spectacle.

Colorization brings this film to audiences who might otherwise pass it by. A viewer who associates black-and-white European art cinema with difficulty may find that the colourised Pickpocket is simply a gripping crime story about a man who cannot let himself be loved — and that is exactly what it is.

Technical Details

• Format: MP4 / MKV digital download
• Resolution: HD 720p
• Colorized: Professionally colorized from original black and white
• Audio: English original mono
• Runtime: 75 minutes
• DRM-free: Yes — watch on any device
• Instant download: Available immediately after purchase
• Price: €15.00 (token, rendered by the site)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Movie-Specific Questions

Q: Was Pickpocket originally filmed in colour?
A: No. Pickpocket was shot in black and white and released that way in 1959. This page offers a later professional colorized restoration, not a studio colour release, so the colour you see here is an added presentation of the original monochrome photography.

Q: Who plays Michel in Pickpocket, and who plays Jeanne?
A: Michel is played by Martin LaSalle, and Jeanne is played by Marika Green. Both were cast by Robert Bresson in keeping with his practice of working with performers who were not conventional movie stars, which gives the film its notably unactorly, observational quality.

Q: Is Pickpocket a heist film or something else?
A: It is usually described as a crime drama, but it is not a heist film in the usual sense. There is no big score and no team assembling for a job. The thefts are small, repeated and almost ritualistic, and the film is far more interested in Michel’s inner life and his refusal of human closeness than in the mechanics of a caper.

Digital Download Questions

Q: What format is the download?
A: The film is delivered as MP4 and MKV files that play on virtually any device.
Q: Is there DRM on the file?
A: No. The download is completely DRM-free so you can watch it on any device without restrictions.
Q: How quickly can I watch after purchase?
A: Your download link is available instantly after payment, so you can start watching within minutes.

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