a review of 大黎明

Un Flic is the first film by Jean-Pierre Melville I've ever seen. I was about 11 years old, and was impressed at the time, but I remembered nearly nothing when I decided to rewatch it decades later in 2017. Un Flic was Melville's last film before he died of a heart attack a year later in 1973, at the mere age of 55. The film has a lot of typical Melville style ingredients, such as realism, matter-of-factness, stylish, cold-blooded gangsters, and of course the charismatic and photogenic Alain Delon, the man with the coolest blue eyes until Rutger Hauer came along. Un Flic is an interesting watch, but it doesn't manage to reach the brilliance of Melville's preceding productions, such as Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. There's a train heist scene that could have been very exciting if the train and accompanying helicopter wouldn't have been very obvious toy models. It was probably a budget-related and/or safety-related choice to go for toy models, but it really distracted me. A number of other scenes were quite stylish though, such as the atmospheric beginning of the film, where four hatted gangsters are driving across a stormy boulevard. I also loved the scene where they intercepted calls in a telephone wire house, featuring a dynamic camera pan from tinkering phone mechanics to cops listening to the result in an adjacent room. The atmosphere of that scene pleasantly reminded me of Kurosawa's 1963 masterpiece High and Low. It was a nice surprise to see a French-speaking — although dubbed to avoid the American accent — Richard Crenna and Michael Conrad as gangsters in Un Flic. Crenna is probably best-known as Col. Trautman in the First Blood / Rambo film series, and I remember Michael Conrad from his last ever role as Sgt. Phil Esterhaus from the brilliant Hill Street Blues police series in the early 1980s. Despite Un Flic not being his best creation, I fully understand why Melville's distinct cinematic style influenced directors such as Scorsese, Tarantino, Michael Mann and John Woo.