Henri Verneuil's political thriller is a French take on the assassination of JFK. Yves Montand plays a magistrate investigating the murder of a president. After disagreeing with the findings of an official commission to find out what happened, he starts his personal investigation, reviewing the evidence, interviewing witnesses, discovering holes in the official interpretation and slowly revealing a network of influences that implicates organized crime, secret services and the government.Yves Montand is excellent in his role. It's ironic - and perhaps not a coincidence - that he was chosen for this role. After all he's known as the murdered politician in Costa-Gavras' Z, so this is an inversion of his role. His character Henri Volney embodies all the values we want our civil servants to have: responsibility, courage, initiative, moral convictions.Also fascinating is the subplot about Stanely Milgram's experiments on obedience and authority. In the 196's Milgram conducted experiments to find out how quickly people would surrender their will to others, in order to understand the mentality that allowed Germans to carry out gruesome crimes against innocent people. He discovered that people easily submit to authority figures and will commit atrocities in their name with little incentive.The movie is well written, has excellent cinematography, good twists, gripping suspense, well-defined and likable characters, and a great but severely underused score by Ennio Morricone.

Henri Verneuil was one of France's top movie makers and this film is a prime example of that. It is based on the JFK assassination but takes place in a fictitious country ( not France or America ) and treats the whole affair in great detail. Although the language of the film is French, the décors are deliberately impersonal and not typical of any country or indeed typical of all countries (!! if you see what I mean ) Yves Montand is excellent as the investigator, I find this kind of role suits him well just as in Police Python 357 - a solitary man making tendious and throrough investigations The film is constructed in such a way that you never get bored even through the phsychological test sequence which is admittedly a little over long. The film has not been shown on French TV for some time and is not available on DVD here but I see Police Python 357 appears recently on DVD so I 'm sure that I comme Icare will surely follow suit.

I saw this movie the first time about 20 vears ago, when I was a teenager. Quite shocking then, it now reveals some lacks, though it´s still one of my favourites. I saw it last week, after I recorded it (German version) from TV. The plot is very close to the JFK murder facts, and the authors didn´t want to hide that. Look for the names, "Daslow" becomes "Oswald" when You rearrange the characters. :-) The too long chapter concerning the psychological experiment (based on the Milgram experiments at the university of Yale) is a little bit out of place.But for the rest ... but see Yourself, You won´t regret it!Gerhard

The first time I saw this film, I was in shock for days afterwards. Its painstaking and absorbing treatment of the subject holds the attention, helped by good acting and some really intriguing music. The ending, quite simply, had me gasping. First rate!