Quentin Tarantino was so taken by this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film that he borrowed the concept (a seemingly spontaneous, though obviously choreographed dance at a restaurant) for the famous twist between John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. (He also named his production company, A Band Apart, after the film’s French name, Bande à Part.) The magic of this sequence lies in the occasional unevenness of the choreography — one of the rare dance scenes in which lack of perfection is actually a bonus. Odile, Arthur and Franz, the film’s three would-be crooks, get up in a smoky café, push the tables aside and snap, stomp and clap their disaffected hearts out in what TIME originally described, in 1966, as “an impudent little dance of alienation.” As Odile (the adorable, enigmatic Anna Karina) places a fedora on her head, she and her men play like they’re the cool people in a movie — all while actually being the cool people in a movie.