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Originally titled Le Soleil des Voyous, Action Man teams two veteran international film stars: France's Jean Gabin and America's Robert Stack. Gabin plays an ex-criminal, now reformed and ensconced in a respectable executive job. Stack plays an unreconstituted crook who wants to inveigle Gabin into one last caper. The crime goes off like clockwork, but drug dealers who want a piece of the action kidnap Gabin's wife Suzanne Flon and hold her for ransom. Stack ends up sacrificing his own life to save those of Gabin and Flon. Based on a novel by J. M. Flynn Action Man is the sort of bread-and-butter fare that director Jean Delannoy, famed for his earlier spiritual classics La Symphonie Pastorale (1946), Le Jeux Sons Faits (1947) and Diary of a Country Priest (1950), dealt with in his twilight years. In certain gamier markets, Action Man was released as Leather and Nylon.