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34 out of 35 people found the following review useful:
Obsessive, ambitious, flawed...and thoroughly fascinating!, 20 December 2006

Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

All right, all right, so "Un Flic" is "flawed" and not on the same level as "Le Samouraï" -- but then how many films are? Yes, it's "flawed", obsessive, ambitious, made by an artist who was on top of the world after a succession of critical and box-office hits and probably felt like risking more -- and he did! It's also unique, mesmerizing, to be watched over and over again. And (as always with Melville) it's cinema in its purest, most uncompromising form.

"Un Flic" was Melville's last film, made one year before his sudden, fatal heart attack. It's ambitious all right: it stars France's top stars of the 1970s (Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve, she in a supporting role at a time when she NEVER did supporting roles); and for the first time -- probably with an eye on the US market -- Melville uses an American star, Richard Crenna, who delivers his lines in absolutely fluent French (though post-dubbed for accent reasons)

Talk about ambition and risk: Melville includes not one but TWO 20- minute-long, no-dialog, no-music heist scenes! The first one at the bank, by the rainy seashore, is a masterpiece of efficiency and atmosphere. Sadly, the second one with the helicopter/train is THE major flaw of the film, with its phony Thunderbird-like miniature models, especially difficult to accept in these our times of eye-popping CGI effects. It's also too long, it should have stayed out, though one can argue that it's probably the best-lit-miniature-model-heist-scene ever filmed!:)))

The plot in "Un Flic" is a pretext to present the duel between the two complex male characters: Alain Delon's ideal cop made in Noir Heaven, and Richard Crenna's mastermind-thief-posing-as-charming-night-club-owner. They're on opposite sides, but Melville wants us to notice their similarities: their striking physical resemblance (they could be brothers), their camaraderie (Delon can only relax at Crenna's classy joint), their sharing the same woman (Deneuve). They're both cool, elegant, efficient gentlemen, who use violence only as a last resource (though the violence here is implicit, with hardly a drop of blood in view, unlike bloodbath fiends and pseudo Melville fans Scorsese, Tarantino and Woo). They're both art connoisseurs and sensitive to beauty: Crenna goes to the Louvre, admires Van Gogh's self-portrait and wears top fashion; Delon plays jazz on the piano proficiently, dresses impeccably (for a cop) and recognizes a Maillol sculpture when he sees one. But they can also be tough as hell: Crenna doesn't blink when he plans the death of his wounded sidekick at the hospital, and Delon coldly waits for a man to commit suicide instead of preventing it.

Tough as they are, they're surprisingly open-minded when it comes to sex: Delon treats the robbed old homosexual and his teenage lover/thief with unflappable professionalism and even politeness, and is perfectly aware of the transvestite informer's crush on him (the transvestite's makeup and hair color resemble Deneuve's; insinuations galore). And in a revealing, silent scene at the bar, we can tell that the Deneuve-sharing is not an issue (yet).

But in Melville's world, affinities, friendship and "modern" sexual morals collapse when the code of honor between males is broken. Delon is OK with gay people and ménages-à-troi but not with Crenna betraying his trust and fooling him professionally. The Melville code comes from Westerns and Samurai movies; the price of betrayal is death. When Delon realizes he's been double-crossed, there's no place for mercy or compromise in his heart; revenge is the only way out, AND he has the law on his side.

A word about the acting: perhaps Delon doesn't seem very excited to play a cop -- who does? -- but his last 15 minutes are simply magnificent: just watch his face at the bar when he realizes Crenna is lying; it melts down with painful disillusion. And in the last scene over the closing credits, he drives his car drained of all life; he's broken inside, terribly lonely, an empty carcass. Crenna is subtle and properly sympathetic: cop-hater Melville clearly wants us to root for him. Apparently, Deneuve is there just to parade her amazing beauty, but check out the hospital "coup de grâce" scene: no angel of death was ever colder, blonder, more efficient or gorgeous. It makes us think once again what a shame she never worked for Hitchcock!

The visual pleasures in "Un Flic" are so many that multiple viewings are required: the elegant decors, the fabulous cars (that silver Jaguar!), the chic wardrobe and the city of Paris at its most stunning. There's a telling scene at the Louvre where Melville seems to be comparing himself to the great impressionists: his camera lingers on a painting with a very similar palette as his own (icy blues, pale gris, cold grays). It's a "coup de vanité" from a man who -- like the greatest visual artists -- managed to create an instantly recognizable world of his own through his obsessive themes, unique visual expression and fabulous technique.

The only way you can dislike "Un Flic" is if you're addicted to hyperactive, loud, chopped films; if you can appreciate moderato-paced subtlety and unique visual sophistication, you can do no wrong with this film. Melville's "flawed" work towers over thousands of brainless, spineless, bloody thrillers –- after all, "Un Flic" is signed by the one and only King of Cool. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

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30 out of 33 people found the following review useful:
Not a smash finale (not that Melville knew this would be his last), but it's a must-see for genre fans, 21 February 2005

Author: MisterWhiplash from United States

Perhaps under-looked when looking at the career of the director Jean-Pierre Melville, Un Flic (called 'Dirty Money' in the states, but is also translated as 'A Cop' on the DVD I viewed) is a crime film that goes another step with the heist genre, another (smaller) step with the cop/robber relationship, and shows Melville in (mostly) complete control over his storytelling. There are elements that seem to have evolved (or devolved, whichever you prefer) in Melville's work with the three films going in descending order- Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and finally this film. As this very loose trilogy progresses (a trilogy I mark just by the presence of Alain Delon, nothing more in common aside from the genre), one may notice how Melville progresses with his stylizing, how with each film he goes a little less with characterization and dialog. With Le Samourai it's half a character study, in Le Cercle Rouge there are snippets, here it's all based on the timing of the cuts and subtle reactions. In fact, there is so much of the film that goes without dialog that Melville proves himself to be an opposite of Tarantino- instead of being clever at dialog, he's clever at the plot twist, and more importantly at making note of the 'left-out' detail, letting the audience figure it out. While one can say this is not a great place for someone not familiar with Melville's work to start, it should not be a big disappointment.

The story is one you may have seen before, only here in far more calculated circumstances. Simon (Richard Crenna, in one of his better turns) is one of four who rob a seaside bank on a rainy, foggy afternoon. In one of Melville's most polished sequences, things go good and bad for them when one of the men is fatally wounded. Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon, not his best, but always keen at being icy) is on a case that coincides with another scheme Simon has, involving a suitcase heist on a moving train during the night. Not everything goes as planned, and the presence of a mutual love interest for the two (Catherine Deneuve, practically one-sided emotionally) only complicates things further, if not on the surface. This story is told very, very simply and without anything aside from the injection of mood onto every scene.

From the opening heist on, Melville still has his chops technically-wise almost all the way through the picture. And after reading an interview with him, something about the look of the film made sense (which he said before this film was made): "My dream is to make a color film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in color." One feels that is what Melville is successfully experimenting with in this film, that the methods to which he and cinematographer Walter Wottizm get the scenes are not conventional. To correspond with some of the characters, the colors are cold, or distant, corresponding almost to the unforgiving underworld of Paris- some colors seem to almost blend together, the browns going along with the grays, and the brighter ones (sometimes merely in the background) feeling diluted. That, and the crafty editing pulled by Patricia Neny (the suspense gets laid on thick in some scenes), make up for a couple of big liabilities- that Melville, on tight a budget that he was on, used models for the exteriors of the train sequence, and some scenes don't have a 'new-wave' feeling (i.e. filmed directly on location) but rather cheaply in the studio. Not to mention that the performances from Delon and Deneuve are not really at their peak (Crenna is another matter).

Still, the most pleasurable thing about a Melville film, whether its the poetic Les Enfants Terribles or the bittersweet Bob le Flambeur, is watching the story take on a life of its own. Some things you practically wait on if you've seen Le Cercle Rouge or Le Samourai, like a wild dancing number at a nightclub (here abridged), or a detail to remind everyone who the outsiders are in this world (here portrayed by Gaby). As another tribute to the old-style crime films of the 30's and 40's its still tightly held together, with the pacing almost impeccable. In short, it's not a masterpiece of a crime film (Melville's last before his fatal heart attack), but it remains gripping thirty plus years later, with memorable qualities. A-

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27 out of 31 people found the following review useful:
Underrated Melville effort, 14 March 2004
Author: (dj_bassett) from Philadelphia

Neglected Melville crime thriller isn't exactly good, but isn't bad either -- feels half-finished, more than anything. Crenna and Delon are friends; they're also on different sides of the law, with Delon a cop and Crenna secretly the head of a gang of thieves who specialize in risky heists. On the other hand, Delon is secretly carrying on with Catherine Denuve, Crenna's girlfriend. Plot too allusive for it's own good -- a bit more grounding of the characters are needed, since their motivations as it stands are opaque (why are Delon and Crenna friends? why is Delon carrying on with Deneuve? if Crenna knows, as he seems to, why is he allowing it? what does Denuve think of all this?). Low budget also hurts the movie -- the centerpiece of the film, an elaborate heist on board a moving train, looks phony and very cheap. (This is a rare movie that probably would benefit from a remake). On the other hand, Melville remains a master of gloomy atmosphere, the setpieces more or less work (the opening sequence, a bank robbery in a cold and rainy seaside town, is well done) and the actors all give it their best. Final shot of the movie is very well done.

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22 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
The old economy still there, 7 August 2005

Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

In Melville's last film, Alain Delon is a cop who pursues a small group of fortyish men who first rob a bank and then later intercept a large supply of drugs en-route to somewhere via a bag man on a train. The bank is beside a ruthless sea and the memorably bleached-out and forbidding opening scene is full of mist, rain, and wind that turn everything a sickly pastel. One of the robbers is wounded and they drive away with him -- a sequence that may have influenced Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." But these men are as laconic as Quentin's are garrulous.

Nobody is morally pure in this story, or wholly evil. One of the robbers is a bank executive who's out of work and hides his wrongdoing from his worried wife. The cop, Edouard Coleman, whose ride is American, as is the robbers', is involved with crooked nightclub owner Simon's accomplice girlfriend, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who helps Simon clean up the mess when the robbery goes wrong. Edouard has to look the other way about her involvement. Her first appearance is ravishing: she slides sideways out of a doorway and pauses, framed there, looking perfectly beautiful. She slowly breaks into a smile as Coleman picks out a jazz ballad on the nightclub piano.

The drug mover who's intercepted is called "Matthew the Suitcase." The operation to steal his drugs is long and complicated and is "Un flic's" "Rififi" episode; it's more absorbing than the manhunt in "Le Cercle rouge," but the several plot strains are a bit disjointed.

Despite the ingenious drug heist, being a cop and being a crook are in a way just a job, a 'boulot' in "Un flic." Delon has some dash and dresses sharply but he lacks the panache of his character in "Le Samouraï." The robbers are dreary, determined fellows without the charisma of Yves Montand in "Le Cercle rouge." They're totally middle-aged and middle-class. This puts them on a par with most of the cops and perhaps illustrates Melville's epigraph, from pioneer French private eye (and former thief) François Eugène Vidocq, "The only emotion men awaken in a policeman are ambiguity and derision." This harmonizes with the viewpoint of the chief of police in Le Cercle rouge who repeatedly insists that everyone must be assumed to be guilty.

While that earlier chief of police worked out of a dark but cozy Victorian office, Coleman is in a bright modern building and has a phone in his car, but his well-lit office has a window on a brick wall. The dull routine of police work is signaled by the verbal rituals of the car-phone calls: His assistant always answers and says, "I'll pass you to him." Coleman listens, then says "Where's that?" and "We're going, I'll call you back later." The words never vary. And this flick about a "flic" never wavers from its economical unreeling that's worthy of the best Fifties noirs, despite being in faded blue-gray Technicolor. Melville got back one last time to the old brilliance. Even if the "noir" isn't quite noir, the mood is right, full of resignation and irony.

The plot doesn't quite parse, but neither did Le Doulos'. If it's true as Jack Mathews of the Daily News wrote about the reissued "Le Cercle rouge" that Melville's crime movies are "really about wearing raincoats and lighting up Gitanes and saying very little while being very loyal," then plot inconsistencies and even visual disparities not withstanding, it's still all good. And even if some of the earlier freshness and pungency were gone, in his last two films Melville showed even greater skill at editing and setting up his scenes. So if not canonical, Un flic is nonetheless another valuable work by this prince of darkness, this splendidly moody minimalist and inspirer of the French New Wave.

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16 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
'Dirty Money' is far from Melville's best, but I still think there's a lot to admire about it., 26 April 2004
Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia

'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.

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17 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Forget Hitchcock and Hawks!, 18 March 2001

Author: Sorsimus from Surrey

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)

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11 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
very stylish, 15 December 2005

Author: RanchoTuVu from Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico

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.

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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Melville's Swan Song is a Dank, Steely Crime Thriller with a Dreamlike Serenity., 10 October 2009

Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

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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8 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Flowing in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, 1 November 2008

Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

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, with a vital emptiness that is the essence of Zen ebbing at the center.

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.

And as with previous Melville films, Un Flic revolves around the set-piece. As with the now famous heist sequence in LE CERCLE ROUGE, the two main set-pieces in Un Flic, a bank robbery at the beginning and a train heist after the middle point, are orchestrated with surgical precision, with deliberation, method and meticulous attention to detail. Both in the acts required of the characters and Melville's direction, as if Melville's prowling camera is what makes things happen, what makes the heist take place. The heists themselves taking place in utter silence, save for some repetitive, mechanical noise. An alarm going off in the background, the rumbling of the train, the sound of a helicopter; sounds left to repeat monotonously until they're not heard at all, until they're not there even as they are.

What makes Un Flic flow so effortlessly however is the way Melville handles exposition, the way he handles tension and release. There's an excellent scene where Alain Delon as a cop visits Catherine Deneuve, the girl of the club owner who robbed the bank, and with whom he's having an affair. We know they do from the meaningful glances they exchange in a previous scene while Delon plays the piano. He says she's under arrest; she fondles his jacket and grabs his gun pointing it at him, saying dead men can't arrest anyone. It all turns out to be erotic foreplay. Melville generally doesn't reveal any more than he has to. The characters don't blab exposition just to say something.

While not heavy on characterization, and not heavy on plot either, Un Flic soars with tension and an existential quality similar to previous works of Melville, only better. Alain Delon's character is only roughly sketched but he carries with him residues of the other characters he played for the director so that we feel we already know him. One of the absolute best crime films of the seventies.

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20 out of 35 people found the following review useful:
From the sublime to the ridiculous, 24 July 2003

Author: StevieGB from London, England

Jean-Pierre Melville directed some great stuff and some awful stuff, but never did he manage to combine the two as he does in this movie. The opening twenty minute bank robbery in a near deserted seaside town in the pouring rain is amazing, probably the single best setpiece he ever directed. From then on, though, it's all pretty much downhill. Delon lacks his usual presence and appears to be on autopilot (in total contrast to Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai); it's a competent performance, but I've rarely seen an actor look so bored. Perhaps he was unsure about the almost total lack of dialogue in the film, which is a shame, as this is one of its few interesting plus points. Many of the scenes take place against obviously painted studio backdrops, which is especially grating given that the opening is so well done. And most laughably of all, the "highlight" of the film, a daring robbery in real time, in which a thief is dropped from a helicopter onto a moving train and then picked up again, is done with models, and looks like an amateurish version of Thunderbirds.

If someone could steal the opening sequence (or 'reference' it) and do the helicopter robbery properly, there's a good remake waiting to be done. Until then, we'll just have to settle for a great lesson in how to open a film.

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