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For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

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.

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).

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.

Immortality followed by death, like Parvulesco said. Rumour has it that Melville was dissatisfied with this film. Can't see why. Not long ago I bought the 6 DVD set of his flicks from 1956 – 1972. All masterful, but this is the one I keep coming back to, and I do think I think of it as a pinnacle of his metier.What does Melville mean by invoking "Ambiguity and Derision" over the opening credits ? It's as though he's talking to himself all through the narrative, from beginning to end. The initial scene is one of the most hypnotic I've ever seen. Charged with palpable, palpitating tension, yet at the same time unnervingly surrealistic --- not Dali, more reminiscent of Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico --- it leaves Hitchcock standing in the suspense stakes.The action begins with the Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. It is virtually certainly the Esplanade de la Mer, on France's Atlantic western coastline, abutting the Bay of Biscay, known throughout history as a stormy quarter of the ocean. That esplanade is near St Jean de Monts, between Brest and Bordeaux, and not far from La Roche-sur-Yon. Nowadays there's a golf course just north of St Jean de Monts. The names of these real places are supplied by the cinematography. Realistic surreality is also supplied, by the vast condominium block, presumably only just completed, in 1971, and still unoccupied. Although there was perhaps one inhabited window.The fag-end of the day's weird financial activity in the corner BNP (not the British Nazi Party, of course) bank-shop is bizarre. Who are these glum people executing enigmatic transactions ? Where do they live ? How did they get to be there on what appears to be one of early January's most miserable afternoons ? It's riveting.Skip now to the sequence on which so many have hanged themselves up. This is the insanely planned and impeccably executed robbery from a suitcase, minded on a moving train by Bagman Matthieu, of a large number of plastic packages filled with a powdery white substance. All film plots are completely phony, riddled with holes, but except for here, they fake reality. Melville, however, is deliberately saying that he knows you ought to know it's completely ridiculous: take a good, long, very long look at the dinky toys, the Hornby train set, the plastic manikin. Verfremdungseffekt, as one perceptive commentator puts it. Why ? But then, why not ? It's just a movie. Think about it. Flickering images in two dimensions.What a phenomenal masterpiece this film is. You can see it must be, when you read the numerous failed reviews. Here's something for chewing on: "By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and 'fictive' qualities of the medium, the viewer is alienated from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the action as mere 'entertainment.' Instead, the viewer is forced into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse him of the notion that what he is watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This effect of making the familiar strange serves a didactic function insofar as it teaches the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since the medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions." Why use five words, when fifty will do ?