A Cop (1972)
"Un flic" (original title)

Bank robbery in small town ends with one of the robbers being wounded. The loot from the robbery is just a asset for the even more spectacular heist. Simon, gang leader and Paris night club... See full summary »

Director:

Jean-Pierre Melville

Writer:

Jean-Pierre Melville

Stars:

Alain Delon, Richard Crenna, Catherine Deneuve

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Alain Delon	...	Commissaire Edouard Coleman
Richard Crenna	...	Simon
Catherine Deneuve	...	Cathy
Riccardo Cucciolla	...	Paul Weber
Michael Conrad	...	Louis Costa
Paul Crauchet	...	Morand
Simone Valère	...	Paul's wife
André Pousse	...	Marc Albouis
Jean Desailly	...	Distinguished gentleman who was robbed a statue
Valérie Wilson	...	Gaby
Henri Marteau	...	Police officer instructor of shooting
Catherine Rethi
Louis Grandidier
Philippe Gasté	...	Un policier
Dominique Zentar

Storyline

Bank robbery in small town ends with one of the robbers being wounded. The loot from the robbery is just a asset for the even more spectacular heist. Simon, gang leader and Paris night club owner, must also deal with police comissaire Edouard Colemane, who happens to be his good friend.

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Plot Keywords:

robbery | gang | bank robbery | police | bank | 

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Genres:

Action | Crime | Thriller

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Certificate:

PG

Details

Country:

France Italy

Language:

French

Release Date:

1975 (USA)

Also Known As:

Dirty Money

Filming Locations:

Splendid Hôtel, 54 Rue Fondary, Paris 15, Paris, France

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

$10,341 (USA) (19 April 2013)

Gross:

$24,333 (USA) (26 April 2013)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Euro International Film (EIA), Oceania Produzioni Internazionali Cinematografiche

Technical Specs

Runtime:

98 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

While Alain Delon's character, Commissaire Coleman, examines a crime scene, we see a brief shot of a wall on which are inscribed several names including the one of his character in one of his previous collaborations with Jean-Pierre Melville: Jef Costello, the "hero" of the Le Samouraï.

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Quotes

Commissaire Edouard Coleman: People will do the wrong thing, they always do.

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Connections

Referenced in Le petit lieutenant (2005)

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Soundtracks

"C'est Ainsi que les Choses Arrivent"
Written by Michel Colombier
Lyrics by Charles Aznavour
Performed by Isabelle Aubret

User Reviews

Melville's Swan Song is a Dank, Steely Crime Thriller with a Dreamlike Serenity.

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.