The Ruffian
1983 film by José Giovanni
The Ruffian (French: Le Ruffian) is a 1983 French-Canadian crime adventure film written and directed by José Giovanni and starring Lino Ventura, Bernard Giraudeau and Claudia Cardinale. It is based on Giovanni's 1969 novel Les Ruffian.
Plot
The film follows Aldo, an adventurer who works at a gold mine in Canada. The mine is attacked by bandits, who kill everyone except Aldo and two First Nations people. They seek revenge by killing the bandits and stealing back their gold. Having suspicion of the two First Nations people, Aldo then proceeds to run off without them, but then loses the gold in a river. He drives to his home Montreal to recruit his friends John and Gérard, and his wife Éléonore, to help him retrieve the gold from the river. Meanwhile, the two First Nations people whom Aldo betrayed seek to recover the gold as well.
“The Ruffian” enters the record as 1983 film by José Giovanni. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ruffian, film and José can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Ruffian” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ruffian, film and José provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1196360. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983 and 1969.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Ruffian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.