| Jean-Paul Belmondo will always be remembered for his embodiment of the emblematic anti-heroes of the New Wave in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle / Breathless (1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965), but he has also been a pillar of the French mainstream cinema for over two decades.
Belmondo's early success stemmed from stage-bred acting skills and unconventional looks: his engagingly lived-in face, dangling gauloise and casually insolent delivery memorably defined the persona of his early films, from Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques / The Big Risk (1960) and the Godard films to Peter Brook and Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile (1960) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, prêtre (1961). Like his rival Alain Delon, Belmondo turned away from auteur cinema towards popular genres after the success of the swashbuckler Cartouche (1961) and especially L'Homme de Rio / That Man from Rio (1964). Also like Delon, Belmondo favoured stories of virile adventure and friendship, but laced with humour and famously undoubled stunts (if Delon emulated Clint Eastwood, Belmondo was in the James Bond mode). "Bébel" became one of the populist heroes of French cinema in a series of vehicles such as Borsalino (1970, with Delon), Le Casse (1971, France/Italy), Le Magnifique (1973) and L'As des as (1982). But again like Delon, his popularity declined in the late 1980s and his output has slowed. Apart from producing his own as well as some auteur films (Alain Resnais' Stavisky..., 1974, Claire Denis' Chocolat, 1988), he has triumphantly returned to the Parisian stage. He starred in a nulti-layered role (as Jean Valjean, but also as a wrongly accused convict and a boxer/removal man who becomes a resistance hero) in Claude Lelouch's version of Victor Hugo's novel, Les Misérables du XXe siècle.
— Ginette Vincendeau, The Companion to French Cinema
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