Review of A Cop

A Cop (1972)
7/10
Nice and intriguing French thriller filtered through American hard-nosed trademarks
20 April 2022
Great Jean Pierre Melville's special achievement , giving a memorable work , Un Flic 1992 was to relocate the American Gangster Film in France and to incorporate his own philosophical obsessions and steely poetic sentiment . Dealing with two set-pieces heists , both of them are ingeniously planned and meticulously filmed as ever . Meanwhile , a psychotic French cop chasing his alter ego , a night- club owner : Richard Crenna and chasing him across a darkening urban lanscape, but he happens to be his best friend. Then things go wrong , resulting in fateful consequences .It results to be a bitter meditation on defeat , deceiving and disenchantment . Melville described this , his penultime movie as a digest of the gloomy definitive underworld set-ups that could be found in John Huston's classic of doomed gangsters, "The Asphalt Jungle" . Darker , more abstract and desolate than his early works , this shows , set piece by set piece, the breakdown of the criminal codes under which Melville's roles have formerly operated . It worth seeing , specially the film's central sequence , a superbly executed train robbery. Delon is excellent as the expressionistless , silent , violent cop , similar to role played in Le Samourai 1967 playing a cold killer . Delon has striven in vain to repeat this success in several subsequent films at the same genre , likewise other known actors like Lino Ventura, Jean Paul Belmondo and usually directed by Henry Vernuil , Jose Giovanni or Jacques Deray. The main and support cast are really magnificent with full of familiar faces , the French Alain Delon , Catherine Deneuve as the glacial girlfriend , Simone Valere , Paul Crauchet , Jean Desailly , one Italian : Ricard Cucciolla and two American actors : Richard Crenna, Michael Conrad.

This motion picture following the American thriller conventions was well directed by Jean Piere Melville, it is stylistically his most pared-down , being his thirteenth and last film, as well as one of the best Melville's thrillers . Melville started as a post-war forerunner of the prestigious "Nouvelle Vague" , but he left this style in various different ways as a purveyor of a certain kind of Film Noir and eventually creating his own company and a tiny studio. His pictures and peculiar talent are very copied and much-admired by contemporary filmmakers who pay ordinary tributes in their films . From his first work : "Le Silence de la Mar" , Melville depeloped progressive and increasing more and more perfect directing skills , including notorious pictures , such as : "Les Enfants Terribles" , "Bob Le Flambeur" or "Bob the Gambler" , "Deux Hommes dans Manhattan" , "León Morin Priest" , "The Finger Man" , "Second Breath" , "The Samuraii" , "The Army in the Shadows" , "The Red Circle" and "Un Flic" or "Dirty Money" . Rating : 7/10 . Better than average . The flick will appeal to Alain Delon , Catherine Deneuve fans and Polar or French Film Noir enthusiasts.
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