Un Flic Poster

Un Flic (1972)

Crime  
Rayting:   7.1/10 8.4K votes
Country: France | Italy
Language: French
Release date: 3 May 1973

After a shaky first heist, a group of thieves plan an even more elaborate and more risky second heist.

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Sorsimus 18 March 2001

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)

chaos-rampant 1 November 2008

Fmovies: 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.

Infofreak 26 April 2004

'Dirty Money' was Jean-Pierre Melville's last movie and many people find it to be a great disappointment. Me, I quite like it. Sure it isn't the masterpiece we'd all wish it to be, but it's definitely worth watching. 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). Simon (Richard Crenna) is actually a thief, the leader of a small three man team. 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. This scene isn't as exciting as it should have been with budgetary constraints letting Melville down. The first robbery is a real stand out however and I recommend 'Dirty Money' for this if nothing else. The movie's dialogue and characterization are very minimalistic, and this is probably the main reason why many find it to be unsatisfying. The relationship between the three main characters is never explained or explored. Neither is the Coleman's with his informant, a beautiful transsexual. Melville doesn't spell things out, the viewer has to do the hard work, but I don't mind that at all. 'Dirty Money' is far from Melville's best, but I still think there's a lot to admire about it. Melville is an acknowledged influence on Truffaut, Jarmusch, Woo, Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson and his movies deserve to be better known.

slokes 22 February 2017

Un Flic fmovies. 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 cha

RanchoTuVu 15 December 2005

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.

jzappa 10 October 2009

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.

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