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.