User Reviews

I saw this for the first time recently aft reading a glowing review by Coventry.

Well, this movie is indeed a solid thriller with a good mystery.

The plot in short - A police detective investigates a series of unexplained killings of unconnected people by a mystery sniper. One of the victim is an ex girlfriend of the detective who tries very hard to find a missing link between all these murders. Though the detective have linked the victims to money laundering, narcotics and prostitution, nothing adds up to a motive for murdering them.

The movie has good locations n a decent musical score but the performances are top notch.

I like the short hair, slim babe, Carla Gravina.

Lemme check out more movies starring her.

... and his best.All that he made afterward can easily be dismissed as rubbish.A journalist -he also wrote words for some songs- he dreamed of the American cinema because he spent some of his youth on the other side of the pond.

Actually,we're closer to Agatha Christie's whodunit than to American film noir.It's not a problem.It's better to have a good imitation of a detective story à la "and then there were none" than a pale reflection of Wise or Hawks.One by one,people who did something nasty in the past are slain and detective Trintignant is here to solve the mystery ,a mystery which entertains the audience till the very end .Outside Trintignant,the cast is very odd,including French crooner Sacha Distel,as an emcee of a stupid radio contest (a wonderful spoof) ,Segal, who wrote "love story" ,Chabrol's then-wife (and ex-wife of Trintignant)and best actress Stephane Audran,Italian not yet sex symbol Laura Antonelli ,here cast against type,Jean-Pierre Marielle...

Very entertaining.

I had seen this film in a cinema, years ago, when I was a youngster. Now, I have bought the video in a 2nd hand shop, and...

I has been delighted again with:

a) The plot: good thriller about a snipper who kills several high society persons.

b) The actors: Jean-Louis Trintigant is superb as a policeman,engaged in a difficult case. And he runs top speed...

c) The music: Morricone's score is perfect. It goes along very well and underline top moments.

To summarize: highly commandable film.

... Nice (impossible to miss that title, hey Hugh and JJ?)

If Philippe Labro isn't a great film noir director like Melville or Corneau, his polars are however entertaining. There are some very fine scenes in "Sans Mobile Apparent", pop and sexy like an italian criminal movie. In fact, it's quite close to giallo, with a terrible secret surrounding the killings in that privileged town of Nice, but these killings are made with a rifle by a sniper. Philippe Labro was mainly a journalist and he covered the most well known sniper story, Kennedy's killing. Labro loved guns and rifles, we feel it in this movie.



What bothers me is that Labro shot that polar as a cinephile, giving Trintignant some Bogart gestures like Godard with Belmondo in "Breathless", and those few new wave quotes are rather painful to me, Trintignant's character should have been more worked, he is too much stereotyped, sometimes being too much without explanation. But the sulfurous 70s atmosphere is great, the girls are sexy (Audran, Sanda, Gravina) and master Morricone's score is sumptuous.

Philippe Labro must love "the Sniper" by Edward Dmytryk.

In Nice, Inspector Stéphane Carella (Jean-Louis Trintignant) returns from vacation with his friend Jocelyne Rocca (Carla Gravina). Soon he has to investigate the murder of a wealthy and wolf businessman by a sniper. Then two other successful man are murdered in the same way and Carella does not find the link for the murders. When he meets Jocelyne in his apartment and she is murdered in front of his building, Carella believes he has found a clue to be followed.

"Sans mobile apparent", a.k.a. "Without Apparent Motive", is a good French thriller with a mysterious police story. Jean-Louis Trintignant has excellent performance, as usual, as a persistent investigator of murders where nobody sees the sniper in a time where there was no technique to investigate the DNA. Therefore, the police investigation had to follow clues. However, the rushed conclusion is weak. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Sem Motivo Aparente" ("Without Apparent Motive")

Jean Louis Trintignant is terrific in this well-plotted and stylish thriller. An investigation of apparently motiveless murders really hits close to home when the former mistress of the detective becomes a victim just minutes after talking to him. The solution to the murders is utterly logical and utterly surprising. Trintgnant has the same magnetic screen presence he had in "Z", but here he actually gets to do things like deliver lines! Dominique Sanda provides the eye-candy. For my money, this was one of the two best thrillers of 1972, the other being Hitchcock's "Frenzy." It doesn't appear to be available on videotape, but if you get a chance to see it, don't miss it.

Imagine you have a fine cast, an interesting crime story, a great location - Nice, the "capital" of the French Riviera - and, last but not least, Ennio Morricone to score the whole lot. How can you possibly botch it? Well the opening credits give you the answer with a very shaky, ill-framed helicopter shot of the Riviera around Nice. It takes a bad director to request this kind of (costly) shot and not make sure it will be good. It takes a very bad director to accept such poor images into the final cut - the simple thought of the contrast between the wonderful landscape and the horrendous camera work still makes me ill at ease. A hackneyed postcard montage would have been better.

Do I really need to elaborate on all the ugly work a very bad director can do? Just watch his cameo (67min into the movie), and see for yourself how pretentious the guy looks. Basically the choice to over-edit the script fatally leads to a boring editing where scenes are just put together in line. No consistent inner rhythm can result from such a lazy approach to film-making. Nothing builds up, and worst of all, the script falls apart by giving you the answer way before the end.

Actually, more than 20 minutes before the ending, all of a sudden, we are explained the mysterious link between the murders, something that occurred 8 years before. It soon becomes obvious what is the motive for this shooting spree, but it takes the bright head detective a very long time to close the now ludicrous investigation: with or without a lead the Police doesn't know what to do.

Sans mobile apparent - An Elusive Motive - is so bad that nobody is able to shine. For Trintignant, the only consistent character trait is that he always wash his hands (must be some kind of powerful biblical reference) and Jean-Pierre Marielle is either miscast or awfully misdirected. Even Morricone's interesting score gets tedious after it has been looped in so many times to help fill in all the emotional blanks.

Philippe Labro made half a dozen movies. A couple are acceptable pot-boilers, but in every one the pretentious writer-songwriter-director-journalist cannot refrain from overloading the buffer of his poor cinema skills. Yet, as far as I can remember, he never came close to making such a gigantic dud: here he simply misses every mark.

An exceptional movie construction, masterminding the script, the actors, the music and the location. Each scene, per day and murder, and each actor's performance leave vivid pictures in my mind: the plunge in the swimming-pool, the deceived look of Gravina in her love-sex affair with Trintignant, the full power run of Trintignant around the Nice harbor, the final death posture of the murderer. Jean-Louis Trintignant camps a local French Riviera inspector, very self-image oriented as are most of the featured residents of the Cote d'Azur. A series of murders with no evident link is followed by Trintignant, each one filling a piece of the puzzle and bringing him closer to the murderer. Labro, the film director, shoots real-street-life and picks up the best essence of each of his actors. Beyond Trintignant, each other actor seems to have the second role while playing their cast with their own personality. Labro could have been another Jean-Pierre Melville and his magnificent "Le Cercle Rouge". This "Sans Mobile Apparent" showed all the promising ingredients needed by the French cinema to find a respected place in action movies. Labro followed up with "l'Heritier", not bad, far not as good, the magic having disappeared. My biggest regret: "Sans Mobile Apparent" is as yet unavailable in DVD and does not play on TV anymore.

By the end of 1971, "Dirty Harry" was released in the US, and "Sans mobile apparent" in France. Both do have clear similarities. One of the two was a groundbreaking cop-thriller, paving the way for the genre, the other one was quickly forgotten. Guess who is who?

Nice: A sniper kills four people. Ace cop Carella is searching for the missing link between the victims.

This is all you need to say about the plot, there is really not much more about it. Sure, the screenplay tries to add various aspects, but fails miserably. The biggest letdown is Carella himself. I've rarely seen an uber-cop as boring as him. He is noteworthy because he continuously washes his hand, and he is apparently the best marksman in the world (ridiculously exaggerated in one certain scene). But that's about it. There is a difference between being cool and annoying. I'm not sure Trintignant knew. Either he was bored to death when shooting this, or he was just wooden – I'd rather go for the first option. But then there are two instances in the movie when he smiles – this is so unintentionally funny it almost hurts. Well, to his defense, the screenplay just doesn't have anything in store for his character. Totally implausible he were in love with one of the victims (is Nice that small?) and would even quit duty at the end of the movie. This is not working at all. By 1971 the Italians did great "dirty cop" thrillers with Franco Nero, and the aforementioned "Dirty Harry" was in the starting blocks – compared to those charismatic guys Monsieur Carella is an utter disappointment. It's just not enough to have a title cards trying to sell that guy as a bad-ass adventurer…

The screenplay does have a reasonable pace, at least enough to avoid total boredom. But the victims are killed quickly and you can tell minutes in advance who'll be next. Just in very few sequences some real tension and speed can be found, otherwise this is just tedious and resembles a TV procedural. The missing link then arrives out of the blue and is totally far-fetched. A poor excuse to connect the random victims, just to drag out the police investigation. No surprise then that the finale is just as rushed and constructed as the rest of the plot, failing to provide any tension.

Of course it's not all bad. The Mediterranean scenery is quite nice (let's forget about the shaky helicopter shots in the beginning), Ennio Morricone provides a very cool score. In a small role we get to see Laura Antonelli, whose striking beauty and fragility is quite memorable. Unfortunately she kind of overacts in one particular scene, but otherwise she is very convincing and a better screenplay would have capitalized on her character. And I basically liked the real-time approach in some sequences, but it's just done too rarely and without too much effect.

Overall I could recommend this to die-hard fans of Trintignant only. Anyone who just wants to see a good cop thriller should avoid it. There are plenty of better alternatives out there.

In the city of Nice, in the beautiful and sunny French Riviera, a sniper cold-heartedly assassinates four people in less than 48 hours. There isn't an obvious connection between the victims, but since they are all upper-class society members, chief-commissioner Carella senses a lot of pressure to catch the killer fast and to prevent further murders from happening.

It's been such a long since I watched a good old-fashioned, authentic giallo! Okay, so "Without Apparent Motive" is French instead of Italian, and a sniper rifle isn't exactly a traditional giallo murder weapon, but still I feel it qualifies as a bona fide giallo! After all, many delicious trademarks are well-represented, like the convoluted whodunit plot, a mysterious but merciless killer, a struggling police commissioner and many gorgeous women. Dominique Sanda, Carla Gravina and especially Stéphane Audran look lethal and incredibly seductive in their roles.

Although named "Without Apparent Motive", the assassin certainly has a motive for the murders he/she commits, and the gradual and suspenseful revelation of the motive is definitely the strongest quality of the movie. Trintignant plays in his very own typical love-or-hate-him style. I always wonder if he just acts arrogant, or really is arrogant. The locations and scenery are amazing, the great Ennio Morricone wrote another fantastic score, and many sequences are masterfully photographed.

This is one of the ten worst films I have ever seen.

Story: A poor "List of Adrien Messenger" rip-off. Screenplay: Flat. There isn't a good line in the whole picture. Acting: Cardboard to painfully ridiculous, particularly Marielle, who's usually excellent. Soundtrack: Bad Moricone. Photography: Unremarkable.

There is absolutely nothing to commend this film... except, maybe, the candy-for-the-eye shot of Stéphane Audran's cleavage.

I don't know why I sat through this film. Of the three other Labro films I've seen, "L"Alpagueur" "Rive Droite, Rive Gauche" & "La Crime" only the latter was good. I trashed the other two but neither of these two were as bad as "Sans Mobile Apparent". There are so many watchable to good films to see I feel cheated out of 100 minutes of my life. Pity I can't sue.

Good solid thriller with fine central performance from Jean Louis Trintignant and very decent score from Morricone. Taught, interesting, involving and amusing from start to finish this good looking film has much to offer including some strange casting and an understated but sleazy background.

Erich Segal, writer of Love Story and person responsible for the screen play of Yellow Submarine(!) plays an off the wall astrologer and ex-wife of Trintignant and then wife of Chabrol turns up with bulging bust looking extremely sexy. Singer Sacha Distel is another surprising performer and does well as a TV presenter. The action takes place in and around Nice and more particularly around its harbour as a sniper begins to kill, seemingly at random, or 'Without Apparent Motive'.

Watching a boring Trintignant (not such a good actor as he seems to pretend ), trying to ridiculously, and over libidinously, score every woman he meets, pretending to be one of the best French cop, and one fine shooter (with a gun), directed by a very bad director is a suffering and boring experience.

Only Dominique Sanda and Stéphane Audran are « saving » scenes they play into, and make le want to watch the film entirely.

The story is not thrilling, the small parts (sous préfet, chief of police, ex girlfriend, tv host) are over acted and very cliché.

Instead of capturing the audience attention, the director is very found of filming ladies cleavage, but not in a subtle way. Labro is so ego-centered that he is projecting himself into Carella character. A wannabe womanizer and man of action. In vain again. As funny as ridiculous.

This movie is a waste of time.

As an intelligent thriller, "Sans Mobile Apparent" allows viewers to keep on guessing about the real motives of a shrewd criminal. It does not take viewers long to realize that a criminal case has become too tough to be solved when there is hardly an apparent motive for a crime. Director Philippe Labro chose to narrate his story in a 'fast pace' mode as a lot happens in three days. It is only through meticulous planning and research that a determined police inspector is able to unearth that some past events are casting their shadows in the form of present day killings. French actor Jean Louis Trintignant is a perfect choice as a no nonsense cop who is absolutely serious about his job. His dedication to his work is so perfect that he does not even tolerate his colleagues eating chewing gum. Although "Sans Mobile Apparent" has been compared with other Hollywood films, it is unique in its own narration of a milieu where rich people lead rakish lives with fatal consequences. Monsieur Philippe Labro is an important personality in the world of French cinema. Apart from making films, he has written many best selling novels as well as articles for magazines. He has also appeared on television. As one looks at his filmography, it is rather strange to note that he no film was directed by him in last three decades. His last film "Rive Droite Rive Gauche" with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye was made in 1984. However, one should feel happy to learn that as an active filmmaker Philippe Labro has made seven important films which are known for their elements of suspense and thriller.

A sniper is killing off a series of people who seem to be connected in some way. A detective investigating the case seems to come into contact with the victims shortly before they are dispatched.

This is a stylish French murder-mystery set in Nice. It's well served on the acting personnel front. Jean-Louis Trintignant is very good in the central role as the brooding detective; while there is interesting support from others, such Stéphane Audran (leading lady from several Claude Chabrol films) and Jean-Pierre Marielle (who played a memorable flamboyant homosexual private investigator in Dario Argento's giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet). Another welcome addition is Ennio Morricone's contribution; once again his score is excellent and adds to the atmosphere greatly. The dark story is offset effectively by its beautiful sunny locations too. It adds a bit of glamour to the grime.

Sans Mobile Apparent is a well-constructed mystery with good plotting. It's a movie that is screaming out for a DVD transfer, it's one of the stronger French thrillers from the 70's.

I will always take pleasure from watching this feature that I saw when I was a grown up kid, thirteen years old. It is full of charm, atmosphere, helped by a flawless cast and of course a terrific Ennio Morricone's score. Freely adapted from an Ed McBain's novel, Jean Louis Trintignant plays inspector detective Carella, the famous lead - and there are many of them - of the non less famous Ed Mc Bain 87th precinct novel saga, the best police procedural stories ever made. It is really agreeable to watch, shot in Nice, French Riviera instead of New York, for the novel. The intrigue it self is also good, quite not that new either. But who cares? Just enjoy.

The movie is based on a book by McBain. Never having read the book I can't comment on the fidelity of the adaptation. However, the movie deals with some themes dear to McBain's heart : the difficulty and responsibility of detective work ; the speed at which a problem can turn into a circus, a stampede or a political affair ; the difficulty of policing a modern city where almost all citizens (good or bad) can hide, morph and reinvent themselves. (If you're living in a large city : would you be willing to swear that the kindly gentleman sitting on a park bench and feeding the pigeons is indeed a retired high school teacher, and not an Israeli spy master or a judo instructor kicked out of the Navy Seals for excessive brutality ?) There is also a nicely satirical edge to the work.

The translation to French society works well and the sun-drenched city of Nice is nicely juxtaposed with the relentlessly "noir" atmosphere. The masterful Morricone music evokes a general sense of wrongness and menace.

It should be noted that Trintignant's inspector Carella is not an agreeable man : he alternates between gruff boorishness and solitary misanthropy, while exuding a smoldering, barely contained anger. One senses that any pimply teenager foolish enough to go "oink, oink" in his vicinity would become the owner of a bullet through the brain in two minutes flat. As an approach to community police work this would not be entirely without merit - but still.