Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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The Gang (Le Gang) (1977)

Based on a book by Parisian Inspector of Police-turned-author Roger Borniche, this wafer-thin crime caper follows a criminal gang in Paris in 1945, the real, historical Gang des Tractions Avant, who, with the suited swagger of Reservoir Dogs and the nonchalance of Ocean's Eleven, take advantage of the city's post-war disorganisation to commit a series of brazen robberies.

★★★★☆

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The Red Circle (Le Cercle Rouge) (1970)

Spare and electric like a Georges Simenon novel, this French crime thriller's first half is an account of how unlikely coincidence brings two crims together; the second half tells of their Rififi-esque jewellery heist with the police on their tail; and the rambling, overreaching whole is delivered with uber 70s French-Italian cool with trenchcoated gumshoes, American cars cutting through Parisian streets, some startling camera work and Alain Delon's icy grey eyes. 

★★★★☆

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Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) (1960)

Despite one major and several minor deviations from the source material that will nag at devotees of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, this is a top-class French thriller with a more sociopathic, more conniving version of the impulsive Tom Ripley of the book and Anthony Minghella movie, but he is still exceeding lucky as he narrowly avoids detection in a murder investigation conducted across the exquisitely, luxuriously photographed sun-bleached coastal regions of Italy.

★★★★★

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