User reviews

In Melville's last film, Alain Delon is a cop who pursues a small group of fortyish men who first rob a bank and then later intercept a large supply of drugs en-route to somewhere via a bag man on a train. The bank is beside a ruthless sea and the memorably bleached-out and forbidding opening scene is full of mist, rain, and wind that turn everything a sickly pastel. One of the robbers is wounded and they drive away with him -- a sequence that may have influenced Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." But these men are as laconic as Quentin's are garrulous.

Nobody is morally pure in this story, or wholly evil. One of the robbers is a bank executive who's out of work and hides his wrongdoing from his worried wife. The cop, Edouard Coleman, whose ride is American, as is the robbers', is involved with crooked nightclub owner Simon's accomplice girlfriend, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who helps Simon clean up the mess when the robbery goes wrong. Edouard has to look the other way about her involvement. Her first appearance is ravishing: she slides sideways out of a doorway and pauses, framed there, looking perfectly beautiful. She slowly breaks into a smile as Coleman picks out a jazz ballad on the nightclub piano.

The drug mover who's intercepted is called "Matthew the Suitcase." The operation to steal his drugs is long and complicated and is "Un flic's" "Rififi" episode; it's more absorbing than the manhunt in "Le Cercle rouge," but the several plot strains are a bit disjointed.

Despite the ingenious drug heist, being a cop and being a crook are in a way just a job, a 'boulot' in "Un flic." Delon has some dash and dresses sharply but he lacks the panache of his character in "Le Samouraï." The robbers are dreary, determined fellows without the charisma of Yves Montand in "Le Cercle rouge." They're totally middle-aged and middle-class. This puts them on a par with most of the cops and perhaps illustrates Melville's epigraph, from pioneer French private eye (and former thief) François Eugène Vidocq, "The only emotion men awaken in a policeman are ambiguity and derision." This harmonizes with the viewpoint of the chief of police in Le Cercle rouge who repeatedly insists that everyone must be assumed to be guilty.

While that earlier chief of police worked out of a dark but cozy Victorian office, Coleman is in a bright modern building and has a phone in his car, but his well-lit office has a window on a brick wall. The dull routine of police work is signaled by the verbal rituals of the car-phone calls: His assistant always answers and says, "I'll pass you to him." Coleman listens, then says "Where's that?" and "We're going, I'll call you back later." The words never vary. And this flick about a "flic" never wavers from its economical unreeling that's worthy of the best Fifties noirs, despite being in faded blue-gray Technicolor. Melville got back one last time to the old brilliance. Even if the "noir" isn't quite noir, the mood is right, full of resignation and irony.

The plot doesn't quite parse, but neither did Le Doulos'. If it's true as Jack Mathews of the Daily News wrote about the reissued "Le Cercle rouge" that Melville's crime movies are "really about wearing raincoats and lighting up Gitanes and saying very little while being very loyal," then plot inconsistencies and even visual disparities not withstanding, it's still all good. And even if some of the earlier freshness and pungency were gone, in his last two films Melville showed even greater skill at editing and setting up his scenes. So if not canonical, Un flic is nonetheless another valuable work by this prince of darkness, this splendidly moody minimalist and inspirer of the French New Wave.

Perhaps under-looked when looking at the career of the director Jean-Pierre Melville, Un Flic (called 'Dirty Money' in the states, but is also translated as 'A Cop' on the DVD I viewed) is a crime film that goes another step with the heist genre, another (smaller) step with the cop/robber relationship, and shows Melville in (mostly) complete control over his storytelling. There are elements that seem to have evolved (or devolved, whichever you prefer) in Melville's work with the three films going in descending order- Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and finally this film.

As this very loose trilogy progresses (a trilogy I mark just by the presence of Alain Delon, nothing more in common aside from the genre), one may notice how Melville progresses with his stylizing, how with each film he goes a little less with characterization and dialog. With Le Samourai it's half a character study, in Le Cercle Rouge there are snippets, here it's all based on the timing of the cuts and subtle reactions. In fact, there is so much of the film that goes without dialog that Melville proves himself to be an opposite of Tarantino- instead of being clever at dialog, he's clever at the plot twist, and more importantly at making note of the 'left-out' detail, letting the audience figure it out. While one can say this is not a great place for someone not familiar with Melville's work to start, it should not be a big disappointment.

The story is one you may have seen before, only here in far more calculated circumstances. Simon (Richard Crenna, in one of his better turns) is one of four who rob a seaside bank on a rainy, foggy afternoon. In one of Melville's most polished sequences, things go good and bad for them when one of the men is fatally wounded. Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon, not his best, but always keen at being icy) is on a case that coincides with another scheme Simon has, involving a suitcase heist on a moving train during the night. Not everything goes as planned, and the presence of a mutual love interest for the two (Catherine Deneuve, practically one-sided emotionally) only complicates things further, if not on the surface. This story is told very, very simply and without anything aside from the injection of mood onto every scene.

From the opening heist on, Melville still has his chops technically-wise almost all the way through the picture. And after reading an interview with him, something about the look of the film made sense (which he said before this film was made): "My dream is to make a color film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in color." One feels that is what Melville is successfully experimenting with in this film, that the methods to which he and cinematographer Walter Wottizm get the scenes are not conventional. To correspond with some of the characters, the colors are cold, or distant, corresponding almost to the unforgiving underworld of Paris- some colors seem to almost blend together, the browns going along with the grays, and the brighter ones (sometimes merely in the background) feeling diluted.

That, and the crafty editing pulled by Patricia Neny (the suspense gets laid on thick in some scenes), make up for a couple of big liabilities- that Melville, on tight a budget that he was on, used models for the exteriors of the train sequence, and some scenes don't have a 'new-wave' feeling (i.e. filmed directly on location) but rather cheaply in the studio. Not to mention that the performances from Delon and Deneuve are not really at their peak (Crenna is another matter).

Still, the most pleasurable thing about a Melville film, whether its the poetic Les Enfants Terribles or the bittersweet Bob le Flambeur, is watching the story take on a life of its own. Some things you practically wait on if you've seen Le Cercle Rouge or Le Samourai, like a wild dancing number at a nightclub (here abridged), or a detail to remind everyone who the outsiders are in this world (here portrayed by Gaby).

As another tribute to the old-style crime films of the 30's and 40's its still tightly held together, with the pacing almost impeccable. In short, it's not a masterpiece of a crime film (Melville's last before his fatal heart attack), but it remains gripping thirty plus years later, with memorable qualities.

Un Flic, translated as A Cop, but rather known in English as Dirty Money, is essentially cool guy movie about man's men who are cops or robbers who smoke cigarettes, hang out in bars, do cool poses with guns and wear cool suits. But it is among the cream of that particular crop, and the reason is its stylistic subtlety and storytelling economy. It is not a feature-length music video like the Guy Ritchie films or an epic patchwork of references like those of Quentin Tarantino. It is utterly confident in its simplicity.

Plenty hold that master French crime filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville had reached his pinnacle long before this, his last film, and he definitely did. But Un Flic plays exquisitely with all his signature muteness, austere faces and bleak colors. Cinematographer Walter Wottitz eschews gloomy soliloquies and melodramatic dialogue for his steely color treatment. What few colors that do breeze in appear to exhale from the poignant grays. The characters barely speak, most conspicuously during the movie's twenty-minute intrepid train robbery sequence in which the robber is dropped onto a moving train via helicopter, performs the robbery and gets back on. The film spotlights two strikingly constructed heists, the other one in a bank. The first is the hold-up of an isolated Riviera small-town seacoast bank. Melville painstakingly films the unlawful act, and how it goes awry when a ballsy teller declines to be robbed without a fight.

Melville's moody, idiosyncratic swan song is an ascetic inkling of the young though despondent, headstrong Paris police chief played by a volatile, willful Alain Delon, who is going after bank robbers and a drug-smuggling ring among his everyday quota of crimes to which he has grown apathetic. But these two crimes, as he discovers later on, are link and affect his personal life. The gang leader is indeed his counterpart, Richard Crenna, an underhanded nightclub owner he became acquainted with while having a prevalent liaison with his coldly gorgeous wife Catherine Deneuve. She shows no fervor for either of her lovers, the impervious ice queen. Crenna plays the civil competitor with played by Crenna with the chivalrous air of a frequenter of coffee shops and theatres. Deneuve plays her character as someone not interested in dividing her lovers by good and bad, but by charming or tedious. And Delon remains Melville's trademark tenacious individualist.

It's a dismally ambient film noir with Melville linking his characters to the quiet panorama around them, as it is set in a neon-lit moist city outlook of despairing crooks who are getting old and need one last score to go out with dignity. Police brutality is understood casually as a truth of life, as are double-crosses among thieves. The film is shot in minimalist style, with the dialogue and the sets being scant, but not rawboned. Melville was a man of simple tastes, but idealistic, zealous, philosophical tastes at that. Un Flic, or Dirty Money, held my engrossment all through with a feeling of a dreamlike serenity before the brewing outburst.

Neglected Melville crime thriller isn't exactly good, but isn't bad either -- feels half-finished, more than anything. Crenna and Delon are friends; they're also on different sides of the law, with Delon a cop and Crenna secretly the head of a gang of thieves who specialize in risky heists. On the other hand, Delon is secretly carrying on with Catherine Denuve, Crenna's girlfriend. Plot too allusive for it's own good -- a bit more grounding of the characters are needed, since their motivations as it stands are opaque (why are Delon and Crenna friends? why is Delon carrying on with Deneuve? if Crenna knows, as he seems to, why is he allowing it? what does Denuve think of all this?). Low budget also hurts the movie -- the centerpiece of the film, an elaborate heist on board a moving train, looks phony and very cheap. (This is a rare movie that probably would benefit from a remake). On the other hand, Melville remains a master of gloomy atmosphere, the setpieces more or less work (the opening sequence, a bank robbery in a cold and rainy seaside town, is well done) and the actors all give it their best. Final shot of the movie is very well done.

Can a soufflé still taste good, even a trifle underbaked and missing an ingredient or two? The answer depends on the cook.

Late one rainy afternoon, four men rob a bank in the French coastal town of St.-Jean-de-Monts, not without deadly complications. The lead crook, Simon (Richard Crenna), leads a double life as the owner of a French nightclub. One of his regulars is a quiet police inspector named Coleman (Alain Delon). In time, their lines of work will shake their friendship like nothing else, not even Coleman's affair with Simon's wife, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve).

"Un flic" (A Cop), also known as "Dirty Money," is a film about the dehumanizing nature of police work. Coleman is suave but conflicted, willing to slap around a suspect or even a suspected suspect but not so hardened as not to be conflicted about that.

"This job makes us skeptical," his deputy Morand (Paul Crauchet) notes as the pair leave a morgue.

"Especially about skepticism," Coleman replies.

Director Jean-Pierre Melville was a leading light of the New Wave movement, and his commitment to impressionistic pure cinema is on strong display right at the outset. We open on the sound of crashing waves, filling the screen with blue. The car with Simon and the other robbers moves slowly into position. With rain crashing around them on an empty street, three of the four men wordlessly get out in turn to take their positions in the bank.

A short but portentous scene is played out through their eyes. Simon's are committed but apprehensive. The old pro who joins him first, Marc Albouis (André Pousse), reads cool and empty. In the car, a former bank manager named Paul (Ricardo Cucciolla) hesitates while the driver, Louis (Michael Conrad) looks at him hard. You can see the fear in Paul's eyes as he reluctantly leaves the vehicle to play his part.

What is up with this scene? It features four French robbers, only one of whom is actually played by a Frenchman. Here, and in many other ways, Melville was clearly doing things his way, establishing meticulous realism in some scenes only to abandon it in others, most notably in a later train heist which features some fine suspense work but was clearly filmed with models.

The weakest element for me in this movie is not the Tyco episode itself, but how it is integrated into the rest of the film. We have little idea how the train heist is being done, or why it leads to the final act the way it does. Yet its aftermath proves central to everything, by which time Melville is giving us not riddles but koans.

Though employing real locations and real-time sequences, Melville doesn't seem nearly as interested in telling a solid crime story, with motives and meanings laid out. His film, like the dialogue sprinkled through it, remains elliptical all the way through.

"We're doomed victims, the prey of actual pros," is something a blackmailed homosexual tells Coleman, which serves as a kind of motif for the film. I don't think "Un flic" sells the idea as well as it thinks. If Coleman is a victim, it's of his own hard code.

But "Un flic" keeps you watching and makes you think. And while casting an American as the lead crook and another as his key partner seems a strange conceit, dubbed as they necessarily are, both Crenna and Conrad make it work, playing their parts with the same elegant drabness that underscores every scene. Crenna's Simon is one character you come to care about, if only a little. Delon may be a trifle too mopey, but makes for an enigmatic center.

As a crime story, it's pretty decent. As a cinematic tone poem, it's much better.

A gang formed by Simon (Richard Crenna), Paul Weber (Riccardo Cucciolla), Louis Costa (Michael Conrad) and Marc Albouis (André Pousse) heist a remote bank during a stormy afternoon. However Marc is seriously wounded and they leave him in a clinic after hiding the money in a sophisticated scheme. Meanwhile the cold Police Inspector Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon) is investigating the murder of a woman and his informer, the travesty Gaby (Valérie Wilson), tells about a shipment of heroin carried by the mule Suitcase Matthew (Léon Minisini) by the train to Lisbon. Then Coleman heads to a nightclub owned by Simon, who is his friend, to meet his mistress Cathy (Catherine Deneuve). When Simon learns that the police force is tracking down the wounded thief in hospitals and clinics and the dragnet will certainly find Marc, he goes with the gang and Cathy to kill him. Then Simon plots the robbery of Matthew's drug in the train using a helicopter. When Coleman intercepts Matthew, he does not find the drug shipment and believes that Gaby is not giving good information to him. But when Coleman discover that Marc Albouis is dead, he connects him to Louis Costa and then to the unemployed middle-aged banker Paul Weber and Simon. They bug Simon's telephone and Soleman heads to confront his friend.

"Un Flic", a.k.a. "Dirty Money", is a gritty police story and last movie by Jean-Pierre Melville. The story is cold, with few dialogs and the bank and train robberies are very well detailed through long scenes. Inspector Edouard Coleman is an emotionless character near the thin line between right and wrong. He sees his investigation of drugs entwining with the bank heist and the leader of the gang is his friend. Further Coleman and Simon share the same mistress that is capable to kill a man injecting air in his vein and this weird threesome seems to affect his last attitude. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Expresso para Bordeaux" ("Express Train to Bordeaux")

Note: On 18 My 2019, I saw this film again. My new vote is eight.

For a police thriller, this movie chose the strange angles of architecture and fashion from which to tell the story. Throughout, the film actively tries to showcase a new, modern France. In the weird opening sequence, we see a sea-side resort with an endless row of brand-new apartment blocks, totally void of human presence in a foul winter-weather. Strangely, from afar, a shop in one of the buildings seem open. Because of the abundant lighting, we might be tempted to think it's a bar, but it's a bank (about to be robbed). The police headquarters is another modern building given lots of camera-attention by Melville, who seems to juxtapose this 'new' France to the old; the contrasts with scenes of the 'old Paris' such as the closing scenes at the Arc de Triomphe are great.

The male characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time to groom their looks. Both Alain Delon and the excellent bad guy Richard Crenna (Simon) are given lengthy shots showing them combing their hair. They parade around in flawless suits, slick ties, lush bathrobes, gold cuff links. These are sharp dressed men, vain and self-obsessed, misogynist and gay-bashing. The gorgeous can-can girls are there (like in so many other Melville movies) but no-one seems to notice them. Delon manipulates a beautiful transvestite into thinking he might fall for her charms, only to beat her up when she fails to deliver on a promise.

Catherine Deneuve on the other hand seems less well served, sartorially speaking; I was not very impressed with her acting performance in this film, but perhaps my judgment is influenced by the ugly earrings she wears throughout. The closing titles highlight that the black dress worn by 'Mademoiselle Deneuve' was by Yves Saint Laurent. I don't know why this was pointed out, since the dress is hideous. Deneuve's finest moment was when she plays an angel of death, wearing a haute couture caricature of the nurse uniform. Quentin Tarantino must have been directly inspired by this to create Daryl Hannah's nurse look when she is set to murder Uma Thurman at the start of Kill Bill vol 1.

All in all, the plot was not that interesting, but since the male actors were all in terrific form it was a very pleasurable movie to watch.

Career criminals wear fedoras and trenchcoats like its 1945 and they're attending a Robert Mitchum impersonation competition. Rain isn't weather; it's sexytime music for a cocaine heist. The world is covered in an uncompromising azure mist that squeezes the life out of every possibility of beauty, whether that beauty is reaching Catherine Deneuve's white blonde demeanor or an enticingly French city street. A Jean-Pierre Melville directed crime film rests in a middle-ground of romanticization and adamant realism; it climaxes at the nearest sight of a Humphrey Bogart photograph, but it's also interested in telling a story where a robbery can be delivered with seamless perfection ... but that doesn't mean that a pessimistic cop won't catch up with you in the end in a hazardously bloody fashion.

Un Flic is a relatively minor Melville film (especially putting Bob le Flambeur and Le Cercle Rouge into consideration), but it's ravishing all the same. Like the problematic comprehensibility of The Big Sleep, it isn't worried about tight narrative. It's about temperament and atmosphere, and it's safe to say that the ambiance of Un Flic is penetrative enough to make your bones break. There's something uneasy that leaks from the ghost blue of the cinematography and Richard Crenna's depressed eyes; the placid slickness of it all can only reach so far before someone is shot.

Telling the interconnecting stories of a tireless cop (Alain Delon) and a nightclub owner (Crenna) who pulls off massively intricate jobs with big payoffs, Un Flic is squalid enough to make us squirm; criminals walk right under the noses of the police, while the police, as well-meaning as they are, are confined to a purgatory of law-breaking with payoffs that brings no one pleasure. In so many other crime films, there's a notion that once the main villains are locked up, the heroes are left satisfied, ready for their next big adventure. But Un Flic exists in an entirely different universe. The chasing and capturing of criminals is tiring, redundant even. Who is having more fun: the sinners, or the rule- followers?

Initially, the film seems as though it's going to transform into a full- fledged exercise in film noir style. Cigarettes are tossed around, liquor is spilled, and femme fatales are easy to come by. But the closer we get to the conclusion, we begin to realize something: Delon's character, Edouard Coleman, isn't a James Bond or a Frank Bullitt or a Harry Callahan. He is a man, a man who was intrigued by enforcing the law many moons ago but is finally growing restless from the unavoidable sleazy details he sees on a day to day basis. Behind his eyes is a glassy emptiness; if he were to throw away his badge this very moment, what difference would it make?

I suppose Un Flic's melancholy edge is what gives it such a lasting impression. The story is too complicated to easily follow and the style is one and the same with Melville's other films. But that blue, that blue, is disturbing. Unlike black-and-white, it gives reality a grit never seen by the naked eye. Crime doesn't pay and don't we know it, but in Un Flic, even renowned actors like Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve can hardly live in a world this hopeless.

Un Flic is a French gangster caper film with many intriguing qualities. Visually, it is really interesting. The color choices demand repeated viewing. I like how there are seldom light colors seen (except for Deneuve's platinum hair and the smuggled cocaine). The muted color scheme generates a lot of gritty atmosphere to help draw you into Melville's nightmarish vision.

The plot is difficult to follow. I'm not really sure about several key points. For example, police officer (chief?) Coleman (Alain Delon) learns the name of the gangster the others had killed in a hospital. From that piece of information, they quickly trap the driver/helicopter pilot at a restaurant? Also, with the physically imposing driver/pilot in police custody, how does Coleman manage to break his spirit sufficiently to nab the rest of the gang? Torture would be needed, but no information is supplied to confirm it was used.

Much has been said about the obviously fake model train and helicopter that Melville shows for the second heist scene. I'm fine with it. (Gosh only knows how much it would cost to lease a train, a helicopter and pilots for a day.) The relationship between Delon's Coleman and Richard Crenna's Simon is a major theme. Coleman is a world-weary and cynical policeman who will employ brutal methods to solve crimes. Simon is an energetic and brave gangster/bank robber. Coleman is more romantically interesting to Catherine Deneuve's Cathy. However, Simon's courage during heist #2 probably wins the audience over. At the film's end we tend to like Simon more than Coleman.

Deneuve's Cathy is one of the richest small roles in screen memory. She's not on the screen for many minutes, but when she is, Cathy is a devastatingly enthralling femme fatale.

For a gritty, Hellish view of police and crime life; with three strong performances; along with a few toy trains and a helicopter, 'Un Flic' is One Crime Flick worth seeing.

Even the staunchest devotees of Jean-Pierre Melville of whom this viewer is one, would have to acknowledge that this, his thirteenth and final film, is one of his least effective. By the standards of the average film-maker of course it isn't at all bad but following in the wake of his four previous gangster films and the undisputed masterpiece 'Armée des Ombres' in which he swapped the Underworld for the Underground, this opus is decidedly lame.

It fared pretty well at the box office but of course the Delon/Deneuve factor guaranteed that but Melville's customary coolness has here become positively glacial whilst many of the minor characters are simply ciphers and cardboard cut-outs and his usually mesmerising slow pace is just plain tedious. The technical excellence that one has come to expect from this director is somehow sadly lacking. Whatever its weaknesses however, it didn't fail to influence the neo-noirs that predominated in French cinema of the 1970's.

What impresses most is the morally ambiguous relationship between the detective of Delon and the crook, played by a dubbed Richard Crenna. Melville has never disguised his distrust of the guardians of law and order and here Delon and Crenna represent both sides of the same coin. It is often said that in order to catch criminals it is necessary to possess an inverted criminal mentality and the methods employed by Delon's character do nothing to contradict that view. Catherine Deneuve is the meat in the sandwich but her role is woefully underwritten.

Even the best directors are like thoroughbreds that only have so many great races in them and here alas there is a distinct dipping of form. As it happened, Melville went to his grave considering the infinitely superior 'Le Cercle Rouge' to be his final film and jokingly denied that he had ever directed 'Un Flic'. Had he not died at just fifty-five whilst preparing his next project with Yves Montand, well, who knows......?

The moody opening sequence promises so much, the deserted storm-lashed seaside location, the carefully staged bank 'blagging' and the clever escape all bode well, but it's all down hill from there. The rest of this movie stagnates with a lack of pace, a lack of dramatic effect and far to much screen time given over to dreary details : washing faces, tying shoe laces. To make matters worse the big set-piece features a truly dismal special-effects train robbery straight out of THUNDERBIRDS TV series. Instead of keeping this brief and maintaining some suspension of disbelief it goes on and on and on giving the viewer repeated chances to confirm how unconvincing the model vehicles really are. And this is not the only poor piece of studio work; poorly executed painted backdrops feature in several scenes at a time when on-the-streets reality was already the established way to go. The story is confused, several characters seem superfluous and as the lead character, Alan Delon sleepwalks though the movie. There is laconic and there is plain boring, and sadly he's the latter on this occasion. It's a performance that matches the tone of entire film.

This is a film so good, in how it understands the minutiae of film, the mechanics as it were, and done with so much straight-forward conviction that it amazes deeply.

It is lean, the form refined, like a piece of wood patiently chiseled by the ebbs.

So as with previous Melville films, it is distant, surely cold, clinical business. It's about characters detached from the world they experience, content to glide through without attachments. A world as grey, dreary and sullen as the faces of the characters, one reflected in the other. The pace is minimalist and monotonous, the movie plodding along in a steady and unflagging hypnosis as if it does not progress at all.

It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance, the plot laconic in what it reveals as much as the dialogue, yet it flows towards its inevitable and cold end in an unnoticeable succession of undeviating changes. A phone-call, a newspaper clipping, a man setting down to eat in a restaurant. Before you know it a man is getting shot.

It's part slow erotic foreplay about cinematic crime, remember the scene with Deneuve and the gun, and part a feel that is the present moment unfettered by any including cinematic baggage. You just watch.

Great Jean Pierre Melville's special achievement , giving a memorable work , Un Flic 1992 was to relocate the American Gangster Film in France and to incorporate his own philosophical obsessions and steely poetic sentiment . Dealing with two set-pieces heists , both of them are ingeniously planned and meticulously filmed as ever . Meanwhile , a psychotic French cop chasing his alter ego , a night- club owner : Richard Crenna and chasing him across a darkening urban lanscape, but he happens to be his best friend. Then things go wrong , resulting in fateful consequences .It results to be a bitter meditation on defeat , deceiving and disenchantment . Melville described this , his penultime movie as a digest of the gloomy definitive underworld set-ups that could be found in John Huston's classic of doomed gangsters, "The Asphalt Jungle" . Darker , more abstract and desolate than his early works , this shows , set piece by set piece, the breakdown of the criminal codes under which Melville's roles have formerly operated . It worth seeing , specially the film's central sequence , a superbly executed train robbery. Delon is excellent as the expressionistless , silent , violent cop , similar to role played in Le Samourai 1967 playing a cold killer . Delon has striven in vain to repeat this success in several subsequent films at the same genre , likewise other known actors like Lino Ventura, Jean Paul Belmondo and usually directed by Henry Vernuil , Jose Giovanni or Jacques Deray. The main and support cast are really magnificent with full of familiar faces , the French Alain Delon , Catherine Deneuve as the glacial girlfriend , Simone Valere , Paul Crauchet , Jean Desailly , one Italian : Ricard Cucciolla and two American actors : Richard Crenna, Michael Conrad.

This motion picture following the American thriller conventions was well directed by Jean Piere Melville, it is stylistically his most pared-down , being his thirteenth and last film, as well as one of the best Melville's thrillers . Melville started as a post-war forerunner of the prestigious "Nouvelle Vague" , but he left this style in various different ways as a purveyor of a certain kind of Film Noir and eventually creating his own company and a tiny studio. His pictures and peculiar talent are very copied and much-admired by contemporary filmmakers who pay ordinary tributes in their films . From his first work : "Le Silence de la Mar" , Melville depeloped progressive and increasing more and more perfect directing skills , including notorious pictures , such as : "Les Enfants Terribles" , "Bob Le Flambeur" or "Bob the Gambler" , "Deux Hommes dans Manhattan" , "León Morin Priest" , "The Finger Man" , "Second Breath" , "The Samuraii" , "The Army in the Shadows" , "The Red Circle" and "Un Flic" or "Dirty Money" . Rating : 7/10 . Better than average . The flick will appeal to Alain Delon , Catherine Deneuve fans and Polar or French Film Noir enthusiasts.

It has something of the atmosphere of "Le Samouraï"(1967), directed by the same Jean-Pierre Melville but, it's not at the same quality level. Alain Delon was born to be the villain, not the cop. Catherine Deneuve is beautiful and nothing more. Maybe too blonde. Riccardo Cucciolla is much better in other films such as "Sacco & Vanzetti"(1971), "La violenza: Quinto Potere"(1972) or "Blood on the Streets"(1974)Borsalino and Co.(Original title). The best are the two Americans, Michael Conrad and Richard Crenna. It is the last film signed by Jean-Pierre Melville and unfortunately the worst, his best film of all, in my opinion, being "Le Cercle Rouge"(1970).

What takes place occurs in a determined and efficient manner, and things don't always go according to plan, but the participants resolutely carry out their assignments. The opening bank robbery is a prime example: a taciturn group of five men led by Richard Crenna rob a seaside bank on a very windy and rainy day. They're all business, from the drive up the street, to each member leaving the car at timed intervals, into the rain and wind, and walking into the bank. When the job starts to go bad, they finish as best they can and drive off into the storm. Later, Crenna is lowered from a helicopter onto a moving train in the middle of the night in order to rob a bag man of the drugs he's carrying. No one says a word, it's all action. It may be laughably fake looking, but it's done very seriously, even when Crenna combs his hair not out of vanity but in order to look less suspicious. This is the mood Melville perfected and Walter Hill recreated so well in The Driver. It's very stripped down, deliberate, and spontaneous. The actors don't say too much, the violence is extremely matter of fact, and everyone goes off into the sunset in their own existential worlds if they don't die first. Which isn't to say that there isn't a story here, there is, one concerning Crenna and cop Alain Delon, and Catherine Denueve, and enough character development to flesh out Crenna's associates quite well, each of them, while also providing for a great dancing scene in Crenna's night club, his strained friendship with Delon, Delon's almost fatalistic approach to policing, all done without the benefit of many words, just a director with a certain style and aesthetic, a very good camera man, and a nice soundtrack.

A Cop on a narc case gets dragged into a bank heist which may be connected to the drug sting; the Cop is having an affair with the wife of the lead robber involved in the heist ..

7/10

Films are often discussed in terms of genre. Most people view genre films as something that relates to Hollywood. Musical, Film Noir, Western... European cinema at the same time is often remembered as the cinema of the artist where each film is a one off event where the "message" transmitted dictates the visual form rather than its production as a generic film.

Nowadays the concensus is that the best of the Hollywoods generic films, such as Singin' in the Rain, The Big Sleep or The Searchers, stand comparison to the canon European filmmaking. However little attention has been given to generic films made in Europe.

If we leave aside national cinemas and genres and turn our attention to "Hollywood" genres in europe we find a couple of overlooked geniuses of cinema like Jacques Demy, Sergio Leone and the director of Un Flic: Jean- Pierre Melville.

They made generic films with a European twist: they borrowed from their more recognised colleagues the practice of only showing the essential. They learned their genres so well they were able to see what was essential. However where Godard or Bresson tried to understand what makes film a film and to make viewers aware of them watching a film Melville and Demy aimed at finding out why on earth Hollywood genre films can be so entertaining.

It is so difficult to understand why the French critics spend years of examining Hitchcock and legitimising our pleasure of watching genre films but totally neglect Melville and Demy.

As far as Un Flic goes, it is just a great film. I dare anyone who likes film noir to watch the opening bank robbery scene in the deserted Riviera holiday town in the middle of winter with the robbers' black buick sedan gliding on the rainy boulevard and not feel compelled to see the rest. Pretty much the same goes with the rest of his mature output, too.

Do yourself a favour and see this. And the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, too. (that's by Demy)

Cops and robbers, informants and double dealings, stunts and effects, action and drama: it's a 70s crime thriller, and a pretty entertaining one. There's even a sequence entering the last third that reminds more of 90s Hollywood action flicks than contemporary genre kin. What else is there to know?

Don't get me wrong, I like 'Un flic.' Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville crafted a compelling story with varied characters, strong scene writing, and plentiful detail to enrich the experience. His direction is rock solid in orchestrating every scene, and the cast give able performances to bring their characters to vivid life. Star that Alain Delon had been throughout his career, I think Richard Crenna rather steals the spotlight here. I admire Walter Wottitz's cinematography, bolstered by mildly subdued but rich Eastmancolor processing, and Patricia Nény's editing is extra sharp at a couple points. The production design and art direction are terrific; the costume design, hair, and makeup are fetching.

The extensive resources and in-depth knowledge of the robbers is fairly incredible, in both senses of the word, but then, I guess they did have the money and The Plan; at worst we can chalk this up to Movie Magic and leave it at that. Far more concerning is the egregious transphobia on hand, not to mention homophobia. Instances of police brutality are even more distasteful in the 2020s than they were in the 1970s; a spotlighted quote is all too on the nose regarding the inhumanity of law enforcement as the feature recalls Eugène François Vidocq: "the only feelings mankind inspires in policemen are indifference and scorn." That the title emphasizes in the end that this is all in a day's work for a cop reinforces that cops aren't to be trusted or respected, so I guess this has that going for it. Firm as the narrative is generally, I think the writing is marginally weak, amorphous, when it comes to plot development specifically. To be fair, I've seen bigger pictures do worse with more.

I enjoy 'Un flic,' but there are bits and pieces that haven't aged well, and/or that weren't appropriate in the first place. I think the writing could have been tightened. Still, for all that, the film is handily better than not, well done and entertaining to the point that its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. I guess what really sticks in my craw is that, good or bad, it doesn't strike me as something I'm going to remember much if at all within a few days' time. True, there's no rule that says every movie has to be a tour de force; that something is a good time can be and should be enough. All the same, I could have done with a tinge more vibrancy, without the noted issues. If you enjoy crime thrillers or are just generally looking for something good to watch, 'Un flic' fits the bill. Just don't feel like you need to go out of your way for it, and keep in mind its imperfections.

Jean-Pierre Melville directed some great stuff and some awful stuff, but never did he manage to combine the two as he does in this movie. The opening twenty minute bank robbery in a near deserted seaside town in the pouring rain is amazing, probably the single best setpiece he ever directed. From then on, though, it's all pretty much downhill. Delon lacks his usual presence and appears to be on autopilot (in total contrast to Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai); it's a competent performance, but I've rarely seen an actor look so bored. Perhaps he was unsure about the almost total lack of dialogue in the film, which is a shame, as this is one of its few interesting plus points. Many of the scenes take place against obviously painted studio backdrops, which is especially grating given that the opening is so well done. And most laughably of all, the "highlight" of the film, a daring robbery in real time, in which a thief is dropped from a helicopter onto a moving train and then picked up again, is done with models, and looks like an amateurish version of Thunderbirds.

If someone could steal the opening sequence (or 'reference' it) and do the helicopter robbery properly, there's a good remake waiting to be done. Until then, we'll just have to settle for a great lesson in how to open a film.