Un flic (1972) - film review

A band of crooks carry out a bank robbery and then an incredible hold-up on a train.  When he investigates the crimes, Parisian detective Commissaire Coleman discovers that they were masterminded by his friend – the night club owner Simon, abetted by his seductive girlfriend, Cathy...

For his final film, Jean-Pierre Melville returns to the genre in which he excelled, the policier.   Un flic comes from the same mould as his earlier masterpieces, such as Le Cercle rouge, Le Deuxième souffle and Le Samouraï, portraying a grim world of masculine solitude and violence in which crime seldom pays. Here, Melville attempted to go further than he dared in his earlier films to depict the moral equivalence of crook and cop, and seems to conclude that the two classes of individuals differ only in the way in which they follow their chosen careers: the crook is an artist, the cop a petty bureaucrat.  The difficulty is that the film veers to far to the abstract and in doing so loses contact with the audience.

The film has an amazing opening sequence, with a magnificently shot bank robbery set on a windswept coast.  The cold, detached style in which this sequence is filmed is evocative of Melville’s greatest films and there is a sense that Un flic could be the director’s best work yet.  Unfortunately, the plot quickly gets muddled and the perspective shifts from the concrete to the abstract.  Melville’s attention to detail, often his strength, proves to be the film’s downfall, and some parts of the film (such as the train heist) are overly directed.

The film is also far less technically accomplished than Melville’s earlier works.  This is in part due to compromises needed to achieve the film’s ambitious sequences on a limited budget (Melville often had difficulty getting the level of financial support he hoped for ).  This is most noticeable in the train hold-up sequence, which is filmed with a combination of full-size studio props and scale models of a train and helicopter.  By today’s standards, the sequence is laughably bad and renders the entire sequence totally unconvincing.

Un flic is also let down by some lacklustre acting performances.  Even Catherine Deneuve fails to sparkle, despite her evident talent and beauty.  The film sees Alain Delon playing a law-enforcer rather than a  law-breaker for the first time in his career.  Having established himself in tough criminal roles over the past decade, the actor fails to convince, and this could have been a major factor in the film’s failure at the box office.

© James Travers 2001


Usually the heist or robbery doesn’t arrive until the climax, after we’ve come to know the participants, and it unfolds after-hours in near silence in the city. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s A Cop, the bank robbery in a western French coastal town opens the film in waning daylight as a storm rages.  Inside the bank, the robbers don sunglasses, making them appear as aliens, as the crashing sound of sea distracts our attention, making the robbers’ concentration seem all that more alien, superhuman. One of them, wounded, will be dispatched in hospital by his compatriots, through the agency of their leader Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy, dressed as a nurse: an image of mercy committing cold-blooded murder.

Cathy is also in bed with Edouard, the Parisian police chief. At one point Edouard also dons sunglasses; are they all the same?  Edouard is brutal, cynical; he brusquely beats the arrested and holds in complicated bondage a transvestite informant who aches for freedom. The world is morally ambiguous, and Coleman’s coldness and cruelty recall both the authorities and the Resistance during the Occupation thirty years earlier.

Many decry that Melville’s last film wasn’t one of his masterpieces; but it’s a summary work that closes a phenomenal body of work.  Alain Delon is brilliant as Edouard, a man so coolly monstrous that when he opens a bathroom door to apprehend a criminal he instantly closes it to give the man a second longer to complete his suicide, thus saving the state (and Edouard himself) time, trouble.

Needless to say, Edouard’s motives are muddied when he finally has his quick-trigger showdown in the street with Simon as Cathy watches. Simon, it turns out, is unarmed: murder passing for suicide, and suicide masking police business-as-usual.  Un flic is a modern, transplanted American western.

© Dennis Grunes 2007


Un Flic was Melville’s last film and most critics think his worst. That may be true but Melville’s worst is better than most other directors’ best. The film’s opening sequence is also its best, as four gangsters sit in an American car on a rainy French seafront waiting to rob a bank. The robbery and the getaway are a masterpiece of economy, with a minimum of dialogue but lots of atmosphere.

American actors Richard Crenna and Michael Conrad (Phil from Hill Street Blues) play two of criminals and Alain Delon plays the cop out to get them.  As with all of Melville’s films the plot is secondary to the atmosphere and the way men, particularly criminals, relate to each other.

In a later robbery the bad guys rob a diamond smuggler on a moving train.  The special effects during this robbery are poor by today’s standard and even by the standards of the time.  Yet do not let this put you off. The action and figures may be stylised, all Melville’s gangsters wear overcoats or raincoats, hats, drive American cars and drink whiskey, but the overall effect overrides any faults. Melville was also always clear that his films were not intended to be a realistic portrait of the French underworld.

If you like your crime films blood soaked with massive gunfights and explosions then forget this film or any of Melville’s others. If you want something a bit more intelligent give it a couple of hours.

© Steve Beardsmore (Dudley, UK) 2012

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