Un Flic

Jean-Pierre Melville completes a truly revered career with ‘Un Flic’, a typically stylish insight into love, betrayal, and bank robberies.

Alan Delon, reunited with Melville five years after making ‘Le Samourai’, plays Edouard Coleman: a detached police commissioner charged with bringing a brutal team of bank robbers to justice. To complicate matters, the gang’s leader Simon (Richard Crenna) shares not only a friendship with Coleman but also a mistress in Cathy (Catherine Deneuve).

As situations conspire to intensify, Coleman’s rigour is first tested and then tested again, not least in the form of his beautiful, transvestite informant whose burgeoning crush on him is in danger of spiralling out of control. From the deliciously cinematic twenty-minute opening (a bank heist, set in a deserted seaside town, in the pouring rain), to the final face off between Coleman and Simon, Melville confirms his auteur label for the character-based heist genre.