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.

When this film first began, I was pretty pleased. I loved the dialog and the look of the crooks (with trench coats and fedora hats)--it was almost like a late 40s-50s example of film noir but in color. 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. Richard Crenna and Michael Conrad (from "Hill Street Blues") have major parts in the film. This isn't super surprising as it was pretty common in Europe for studios to use American actors and dub their lines--especially in Italian films. My assumption is that the American actors' star power helped ticket sales, though in some of these cases the actors did NOT contribute well to the film. 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). The film bounces back and forth quite often but manages to do this effectively. The caper is a bank robbery in which one of the gang members is shot. However, it's clear they are professionals and they've taken a lot of steps to cover their tracks and effectively hide the loot. Interestingly, however, there turn out to be a few twists. First, the initial robbery was not THE big score in the film--this would come later. Second, while the scene made little sense (why sneak into a hospital to kill a guy you could have killed much easier before YOU dropped him off at the hospital in the first place?!), it was an wild twist to see how the handled the gang member who was shot. This scene with the beautiful Catherine Deneuve was quite shocking...and effective. Third, Delon's role turns out to intersect with the gang in a way you might not expect.Unfortunately, while the film is handled very well in most ways and shows how wonderfully you can make a film with such economy of language (there is VERY little dialog in the film), a major problem in the movie starts at the 53 minute point. The action switches to a train and you see one of the sloppiest uses of models I've seen since the last time I watched a Godzilla film! It looks just a kid's HO-gauge train set and a cheap helicopter model---which is exactly what they must be! Pretty sloppy. What also bothers me about this is that I noticed some score of 10 among the reviews. How can you give a film a 10 with such sloppy effects? I don't expect mega-million dollar effects, but this was just botched badly and looks bad...and a 10 would seem to imply perfection or at least near-perfection. Plus, plot-wise, don't you think someone on the train would have noticed a helicopter hovering just a few yards above the train for so long?! Fortunately, following these dumb scenes the film DID get better! Up until the silly scenes, I might have given this film a 9. However, considering how many scenes were done with crappy looking models, I think a fair overall score is 7 as it still held my interest. Pretty good and with a lot of potential to be a lot better--unfortunately, it's not among Melville's best though it turned out to be his last.

When I saw Le Samourai several weeks ago, I felt disappointment with the incomprehensible behavior of a supposedly-brilliant hit-man. He seemed to do everything to get caught by the police and then the movie ended in contrived fatalism. I hadn't seen such sloppy storytelling and characterization in a while.Were it not for Jean-Pierre Melville's technical skills, I wouldn't have bothered with Un Flic. Fortunately Melville's visual style appealed to much to me I just had to watch more of his movies. After watching Un Flic, I don't regret that decision.Melville not only has improved his technical craftsmanship but his storytelling abilities too. He shoots the movie with a washed-out blue look, in a Paris beset by never-ending rain. It's a dark, cold world, much like his characters, cops, criminals and prostitutes. He takes time to set up scenes, doesn't abuse the editing, allowing scenes to drag out so the viewer can absorb all the details. Even better he doesn't abuse the dialogue; his characters are introspective men of action who communicate with looks and actions. Most of the movie is told through visuals; the dialogue is sparse, succinct and the point.The story itself is ordinary: four robbers heist a bank, one of them gets wounded and is dropped at a hospital This sets up the eventual downfall of the group as they prepare a new heist, unawares that the cops are slowly closing in on them. 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. But he does nothing for me. It's really Robert Crenna, an otherwise mediocre actor in his own country, who delivers an amazing performance as an intelligent, daring, likable criminal who runs a nightclub and organises elaborate heists. Fascinating as he may be, though, I give Melville credit for not glamourising criminals. Following these men around one realises they're lonely, hopeless people who have nowhere else to turn. That's especially obvious in one of the criminals, a 60-year-old jobless husband who lies to his wife about going out to look for work. How distant he is from the modern movie criminals who flaunt themselves as media celebrities.Another thing I give Melville credit for is for making this movie truly fatalistic. in Le Samourai I never thought Jeff Costello had reached the end of the line; he just gives up when he had many ways to get out. But in this movie, Simon knows his end has arrived and still he fights on. For me that's true fatalism, fighting against the certainty of failure.With a renewed interest in Melville's movies, I can't wait to watch the rest of them.

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.