Un flic

Plot synopsis:
After a raid on a seaside bank in which a cashier is killed, four Paris gangsters flee with only part of the loot and with one of the men, Marc, fatally wounded. They put him in a private clinic and disperse. Their leader Simon owns a night club which is visited regularly by the police detective Coleman, to keep an eye on Simon and to pick up any information he can. Coleman also hopes to see the beautiful Cathy, who is the mistress of Simon but spends occasional afternoons with Coleman in a hotel room. Fearing that Marc will be traced, Simon sends Cathy into the clinic, dressed as a nurse, to give the dying man a lethal injection.
Simon's next project is to lift a large quantity of heroin being taken by a rival gang on the night express from Paris to Lisbon. From a helicopter he is lowered onto the speeding train in the empty country south of Bordeaux, knocks out the courier with chloroform and is successfully winched up with the loot. An informer told Coleman that the operation was planned and catching Louis, another member of Simon's gang, Coleman gets the names out of him. After setting a tap on Simon's telephone, Coleman then he goes to the club and obliquely lets Simon know that the police are onto him. Simon immediately rings the fourth member of the gang, Paul, to warn him. Tracing the call, Coleman races to the home of Paul, who shoots himself to avoid arrest. Simon then rings Cathy to come and collect him. As he emerges onto an empty street carrying an attaché case full of heroin, Coleman draws a gun and challenges him. When Simon seems to be reaching inside his coat for a gun, Coleman shoots him dead as Cathy watches helplessly from the getaway car.

Tags: suspenseful, melodrama

Review:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
Low budget also hurts the movie -- the centerpiece of the film, an elaborate heist on board a moving train, looks phony and very cheap.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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..
'Dirty Money' was Jean-Pierre Melville's last movie and many people find it to be a great disappointment.
Alain Delon, the star of Melville's 'Le Samourai' (regarded by most fans as Melville's best movie along with 'Bob Le Flambeur'), plays Coleman, a detached cop who is having an affair with his friend Simon's girlfriend (Catherine Deneuve).
We see them commit two robberies, one is a bank near the sea in the brilliant opening sequence, the other an ambitious heist on a train involving a helicopter.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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..
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.
"Dirty Money", is a gritty police story and last movie by Jean-Pierre Melville.
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.
"Dirty Money" is a film of several titles, "A Cop" and "Un flic," but it all adds up to the last film of Jean-Pierre Melville, written and directed by him, a noir starring Alain Delon and Richard Crenna - and Crenna speaks French, no less, though I understand he spoke French with accent and was dubbed later.The film begins with a bank robbery that takes place in a seaside town.
Jean-Pierre Melville hit rock bottom with this, his final film, a drab policier about the symbiotic relationship between a world-weary cop, (Alain Delon, far from his best), and a gangster, (the American actor, Richard Crenna, not half bad), and the woman they are both seeing, (Catherine Deneuve, totally wasted).
It starts promisingly with a bank robbery in an almost deserted, wind-swept, rainy seaside town and the set piece is a drugs heist on board a train but Melville doesn't generate any excitement.
except for the handling of the material." This is certainly true of nearly all of Melville's films, who was fascinated with American crime dramas and noirs, right down to the very essence of the details.
Much like Le Cercle Rouge and Bob le Flambeur, Melville obsesses over the details of his characters, far more interested in those than their overall motivations or actions.
Indeed, frequently, Melville douses us with very long sequences (in Le Cercle Rouge it is almost 30 minutes) of dialogue-free situations that crank up the tension of the film simply by indulging us with every movement these characters make.
The lead actors are quite good, especially American star Richard Crenna and French legend of cool Alain Delon.
Initial scene , when the gang arrive to the bank they have planned to rob under the pouring rain , is so beautifully filmed that has become one of my favorite moments in his career.Melville came back once again to his traditional obsessions ( solitude , crime & betrayal, revenge ) and placed them into an amazing heist movie , as a way to explore the human nature.Once again Delon nailed it as the solitary cop and is the prefect vehicle to put face to all these themes.
His performance is so chilled out and so classy , in the vein of the silent Jeff Costello , that this is another classic display of acting , no matter whether he plays a thief or a cop you always wanted him to win.You can predict much of the themes and situations you can face here if you've seen Melville's previous films , but nonetheless this doesnñt make them any lessexciting .
Melville rocks my world, the best cop and robber movie ever.
Jean-Pierre Melville's last film begins and ends as a great mood piece about a cop at the end of his rope.
Unfortunately, right in the middle is a laughably bad heist film!Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve and Richard Crenna make an interesting triangle and they give fine performances.
Crenna is also a master thief planning to rob a drug runner on a moving train.With LE CERCLE ROUGE and BOB THE GAMBLER to his credit, it's impossible to overstate how awful Melville's direction of the helicopter/moving train robbery is.
The story follows a gang through two heists, one a bank and the other a drug heist on a train.Delon is cast as a tough cop..dirty Harry only he drives a Dodge Dart and he likes to slap people.
I love Delon and Deneuve and Melville but this film falls flat.
It's ambitious all right: it stars France's top stars of the 1970s (Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve, she in a supporting role at a time when she NEVER did supporting roles); and for the first time -- probably with an eye on the US market -- Melville uses an American star, Richard Crenna, who delivers his lines in absolutely fluent French (though post-dubbed for accent reasons)Talk about ambition and risk: Melville includes not one but TWO 20- minute-long, no-dialog, no-music heist scenes!
Sadly, the second one with the helicopter/train is THE major flaw of the film, with its phony Thunderbird-like miniature models, especially difficult to accept in these our times of eye-popping CGI effects.
It's also too long, it should have stayed out, though one can argue that it's probably the best-lit-miniature-model-heist-scene ever filmed!:)))The plot in "Un Flic" is a pretext to present the duel between the two complex male characters: Alain Delon's ideal cop made in Noir Heaven, and Richard Crenna's mastermind-thief-posing-as-charming-night-club-owner.
To make things more complicated, there's an awkward love triangle between the criminal mastermind Simon (Richard Crenna), Cathy (Catherine Deneuve) and Comissioner Coleman (Alain Delon).I don't doubt Alain Delon was the main pull: he was a popular star in France at the time.
The police inspector Coleman and Simon,the chief of the gang,are acquaintances.The narration is sober and exact.The plot is simple.The film is fast-paced by narrating minutely few facts (e.g.,the train operation).The director takes his time.The movie is made in bluish nuances and tones.Delon is a tough,icy cop,and has a poker face.My mother,with whom I've seen this movie,liked Crenna's acting..
We know and learn almost nothing about the three leads from film start to end; why is American Crenna a Paris gangster, why is he friends with Delon, and exactly how does Ms. Deneuve fit into the triad?
It's obvious that director Melville was trying to copy, to an extent, this retro look and style.If you are an American, the first thing you'll probably notice apart from some noir touches is that two of the gang members in this film are American actors whose lines are all dubbed into French.
In some cases this is because the dubbing was done very poorly--fortunately, in this film it's pretty good.The film consists of showing the crime and investigation from two alternating views--the crooks and the cop (Alain Delon).
Almost inevitably the heist goes wrong leaving one of the gang badly wounded and then the eponymous character, Edouard the cop (Alain Delon) appears in what at first seems to be a parallel story emphasizing the boring routine of police work.
Melville also indulges his love of American Jazz by having Delon play an acceptable piano in the club owned by Crenna.