Dirty Money (1972)

In this film noir acclaimed director Jean-Pierre Melville's final film a Paris police chief (ALAIN DELON) discovers that his night club owner friend (RICHARD CRENNA) also leads a group of bank robbers. When he's tipped off that the same robbers are planning a drug heist the police chief races to defeat his two-faced friend. Meanwhile the police chief has engaged in some double-crossing himself by sharing the same woman (CATHERINE DENEUVE) with the man he calls his friend. Melville's last film "plays beautifully with all his trademark silence grim faces and gloomy colors" (Combustible Celluloid).System Requirements:Running Time: 98 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/CRIME & CRIMINALS Rating: NR UPC: 012236236245 Manufacturer No: 23624 Product Description

Melville's last; unfortunately far from this best effort

The info shown by Amazon.com for this movie is partly wrong. They seem to have confused the actors' list with those from a similarly-titled movie from 1995.

This is 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 not one but two bravura silent robbery sequence (one at the very 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.

Despite those reservations, 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). July 11, 2008

Un flic (1974)

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. May 22, 2008

More reviews at Amazon.com ...