Dirty Money

"Un Flic" (A Cop) the last film by Jean-Pierre Melville begins beautifully. The opening shots set during a storm in an Atlantic coast town in France, which introduced the bank robbery are incredibly beautiful and tense. Melville sets up the scene in such a way that you are on the edge of your seat through out this amazing sequence. The heat of the film is turned up against the contrast of these icy shots and as the story progresses it more or less never lets up and holds it's grip ever tightening as the cop, Alain Delon tracks down the crime ring that is much closer than he thinks.Extraordinary cinematograph is a highlight of this film and one gets glimpses of watercolor smudged barren streets of Paris in the winter that are gorgeous. This film has its flaws but they are too much of a distraction. Most jarring is the obvious use of models during a very tense scene on the train.A stunning stand out in the film is Valerie Wilson as Gaby a transvestite who is a stool pidgin for Delon. Touching she is and there is the intriguing undertow of the possibility of romance between the cop and the cross dresser. I am never quite convinced that Delon is merely using her attraction to him to his advantage. Wilson is wonderful in the role, a rare un-judging look at a denizen of this sub-culture.Delon is Delon, which in my opinion is simply great. Fascinating to watch. Catherine Deneuve is little more that window dressing but a cool dish for the eyes non-the less. The real surprise in the film is Richard Crenna. He looks to be speaking his own lines in French and gives a nuanced wonderful performance as the head of the crime gang. He is utterly watchable and after a few moments you forget he is an American actor in a French film.Over all "Un Flic" or as it is called here "Dirty Money" is a fun ride for fans of the heist genre. And on a final note, the last shots of the film are raw and haunting.

I follow the most talented character actor ever Michel Conrad.His role as Louie Costa adds strongly to this classic heist film with French stars to boot!The pacing is very different from Hollywood films.

At first glance this seams like a winning formula. It's directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Alain Delon stars, and, look, he's wearing a trench coat! The opening heist is terrific. So are the first shots of Paris. But then, oh no, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Matte paintings start showing up. Huh? That's weird - Melville using matte paintings? That's a first. We are taken to a jazz club but this club is less jazz and curiously a little disco? What? That's a kind of corny. What happened to the cool? And then, it happens: a long - and I do mean long - sequence of the most ridiculous and fake special effects this side of a Toho monster mash. And it drags on. Forever. The parachute scene in Army of Shadows was tolerable because it was short and it's a WWII movie: we expect old WWII movies to have silly special effects. But not a Melville crime-caper. It's so bad, in fact, it's hilarious. Is that what he was going for with this one?Stick to re-watching Le Samourai or Le Cercle Rouge for the hundredth times, and skip this one. Don't say I didn't warn you.

According to some bloggers, this a new edition, made by Lions Gate, of "Un flic" (1974), the very last movie of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville ("Bob le Flambeur", "L'armée des ombres", "Le cercle rouge"). Please correct title ("Dirty money") and actors links, mistaken with "Dirty money" (1994). Maybe "Un flic" has not been unanimously appreciated by critics and the box office but there is no doubt that it is a superb film noir done by a genre master, plenty of melancholy. Full of remarkable sequences, such as the opening one, a bank hold-up filmed under the rain. Pay attention to Alain Delon playing the piano at Deneuve's night club. Excellent performance by Richard Crenna.

The French title is "Un Flic" (a cop). This was the last film by Jean-Pierre Melville. It is a good representation of film noir starring Alain Delon as Paris Inspector Ed Coleman. The boss of the robbers is American Richard Crenna. The femme fatale is Catherine Deneuve.I watch it without sub-titles, being fluent in French, but you can switch on English & Spanish subtitles. Run time: 98 minutes. In color.

Melville's last film is merely great; it is not a masterpiece ; however, this film has great acting and great set pieces. I was particularly taken with Richard Crenna....I kept trying to figure out if he actually spoke the French dialogue or if it was dubbed....it does not really matter because his performance was very impressive.Melville made noirs that are haunting, entertaining, and suspenseful.he really understood what made the Hollywood noirs so good, and he adapted these insights into his own unique vision. Dirty Money is replete with big American cars, hats, and trench coats. It is not the Red Circle, but it is pretty darned good.

The thing about Melville is mood, mood, mood. I liked seeing Richard Crenna in a foreign film alongside Delon, who plays a dirty cop (a la Popeye, in French Connection) but an effective one. He's a man absorbed by his job but unsatisfied with his life. Crenna's character, on the other hand, is more at ease with himself and more human, even though he's involved with the criminal underworld. The line between good and bad guy is very blurry.

False advertising. This is not a Catherine Deneuve movie! Dirty Money with Catherine Deneuve is from 1972, this movie is Canadian/Swiss made in 2008. Did not appreciate receiving this low budget movie when I was expecting a Catherine Deneuve film. Will not being ordering from this sight again, don't need to be lied to.

The info shown by Amazon.ca for this movie is wrong. They seem to have confused this with a similarly-titled movie from 1995.This is actually a reissue of Jean-Pierre Melville' last movie "Un Flic". Not as successful or satisfying as "Le Samouraï" or "Le Deuxième Souffle" for example; Melville himself admitted he rushed into production and should have waited for better conditions and a better subject. It's nevertheless a Melville, which means we get at least one bravura silent robbery sequence (near the beginning of the film as I recall). And there's Alain Delon, the iconic figure from Melville's last period. As for Catherine Deneuve, she gets rather little screen time in this one, but this is one rare instance of a female character in a Melville film.At this price, it's certainly unbeatable for Melville completists, unless Lionsgate decided to play a trick on us like tweaking the aspect ratio or burning in the subtitles (although this practice is not as frequent with US publishers as with French or British ones).By the way, I did tell Amazon.ca their data was wrong, but their response was that this "could not be verified" Considering that the original French title is right there on the cover and that I provided them with the IMDB link that did get the info correctly, I guess this simply means "we can't be bothered with checking the information customers provide". What's the use of offering the option of correcting their mistakes if they don't follow through?Edited to add: Amazon has partly corrected the situation, by merging the cast and crew credits from both movies. Well, at least now people searching for the real director's name will find their way to this title.

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