Flic, Un

Made the year before his death, Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film and his third with Alain Delon after Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge is the director’s most extreme and underrated gangster movie. Parisian police commissioner Coleman (Delon) is not a happy man, but he does what he can to get through each day. Coleman finds solace in his affair with Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who also happens to be the girlfriend of Coleman’s friend, Simon (Richard Crenna), the head of a gang of daring criminals. As the commissioner’s pursuit of the gang intensifies, so does the rivalry between the two men.

Beginning with a remarkable bank robbery on a deserted beach front and also featuring a helicopter heist shot in real time, Un Flic is perhaps the director’s most perfect synthesis of style and suspense. A wonderfully fatalistic study of loss and deception and a distillation of Melville’s interest in the codes of loyalty and honour, the film marks a fitting epitaph to one of the finest careers in contemporary cinema.