Catherine Deneuve holds a gun to Alain Delonalr

Un flic
(A Cop)

Screening on Film
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.
With Alain Delon, Richard Crenna, Catherine Deneuve.
France/Italy, 1972, 35mm, color, 98 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: Rialto Pictures

Melville’s final film is a masterfully chiseled cops-and-robbers yarn which takes the near indistinguishability of both sides of the law—a longstanding trope of the director—to its extreme endpoint. In its wintery, desaturated Parisian milieu, the film finds only stone-faced professionals so monomaniacally fixated on their jobs as to have lost all considerations of pleasure or morality. Surveying from his usual omniscient perch, Melville carves Un Flic down to only its essential action, charting the ricochet of duplicitous activity that follows the film’s opening botched bank robbery, with Alain Delon’s exceptionally callous cop Edouard Coleman at the center of the double-crossing orbit and Catherine Deneuve’s icy Cathy on the murky fringes. Most remarkable of all, however, is a twenty-minute sequence in which Melville daringly departs from his marquee stars to depict in surgical detail the theft, by helicopter, of illicit cargo from a churning locomotive. It is here, with the slow unlacing of a pair of shoes in a train bathroom, that Melville wrings the greatest suspense out of the simplest of actions.

Part of film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

The Shochiku Centennial Collection

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf