Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Although through inattentiveness, I got the wrong Borsalino in the Alain Delon phase of my French culture expounding for Barbara's writeoff, I didn't mistake "Flic Story" for "Un Flic." "Flic Story" is not a sequel to the (better) Jean-Pierre Melville film with Delon as a policeman. Rather it is based on the part of the autobiography of Roger Borniche about his long pursuit and eventual capture of the "public enemy number one" of late-1940s France, Émile Buisson, who escaped from a psychiatric prison hospital in 1947 and went on a rampage that involved more than a hundred robberies and shot at least 30 people.

(Backstory missing from the movie: Buisson was born in 1902. He started killing after his wife and son died while he was imprisoned.) Both the real Buisson and the movie one, portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist, Rouge) had not the slightest inhibition against killing bystanders and those he thought (often mistakenly) had betrayed him.

"Flic Story" (which is the French title as well as the English one) is narrated by Inspector Borniche (Delon), though his voice-overs are only at the start of the movie and after the climax (the capture of Buisson, which involved putting Borniche's wife Catherine (Claudine Auger) in danger).

Heeding the "Show don't tell" maxim—and having paid attention to the three (greater) Melville films starring Delon, Jaques Deray, showed the antagonists doing things. I can't imagine why he chose to show Delon's feet so often. Inspector Borniche is seen (from the knees down) walking quite a lot. It was not Delon's shoes (or legs) that launched a thousand swoons in audiences. Perhaps that is the explanation? Delon (like Brad Pitt more recently) was not comfortable being a "pretty boy" glamorously shot. In 1975, he was 41, with visible wrinkles on his forehead and the start of bags under his eyes. He looked older than most 41-year-old film stars, in fact. (But when he was 25ish! In "Purple Sun," "Rocco and His Brothers," "Eclipse": Whew!)

I don't think that Delon smiled even once in "Borsalino and Company." His dazzling smile appears once or twice in "Flic Story." As a policeman, his wardrobe is much less extensive than as the gangster Borsalino. He wears a dark green trenchcoat in all the outdoor scenes. Like Bogart, Delon seems to have been born to wear a trenchcoat and fedora. Oddly, in that middle-class men wore hats in the late-1940s, Borniche does not. I'm not sure if combing their hair backward was a late-1940s style. Both Borniche and Buisson do (and Buisson mostly goes bareheaded, too).

"Flic Story" is mostly police procedural, with Borniche's boss enraged my some of Borniche's methods, but even more by the repeated failures to capture Buisson. Catherine Borniche thinks her husband works too hard. Buisson escapes from several carefully laid traps. One involving jumping out of a window stimulates a sarcastic comment wondering how Borniche could have been a paratrooper. (I don't know if Borniche was one, but Delon was.)

The final trap is sprung very slowly. This is not boring. Au contraire—the suspense builds.

The capture occurred in 1950. For the next four years (!) Borniche interrogated Buisson about the long list of crimes. Buisson admitted to all the robberies, but not to killing anyone. This makes for a peculiar post-climax, though it also focuses on specific details of the process.

Buisson was sentenced to death and guillotined in 1956. This is not shown. It was particularly gruesome in that it took two tries.

As portrayed by Trintignant, Borniche is one screen criminal who is not glamorized or made the least bit sympathetic. (I already noted that what turned him from a robber into a killer goes unmentioned, as does his being guillotined twice.)

Borniche is not particularly glamorized either, even though the movie is based on his account of his eventually successful biggest case and played by the movie star who also produced the movie. Delon is, as often, very cool. That he is not impassive is visible only in his eyes, and he is as laconic as Gary Cooper in a western. And he "bogarts" many a cigarette: sometimes chain-smoking, sometimes carrying an unlit one in his mouth.

Auger (best known here as "Domino" in "Thunderball," she also played the goddess Minerva in Jean Cocteau's "Testament of Orpheus) stands out in her final scene. (Women are peripheral to the crime stories in most of the Delon movies, I've seen, but like Catherine Rouvel in Borsalino and Company, Auger did a lot with the little screentime she was alotted.)

I wish that there were more Melville-Delon movies, but those who admire the trinity —Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge, "Un Flic—,will ind the Deray-Delon movies at least interesting; more so than the Joseph Losey movies from the early 1970s with Delon playing lost souls: "The Assassination of Trotsky" and "Monsieur Klein," less so than Delon's pairings with Jean-Pierre Belmondo (Borsalino) and Jean Gabin (Any Number Can Win, Two Men in Town). (I enjoyed his 1975 turn as Zorro, too).

The cinematography in "Flic Story" (as in "Borsalino and Company") was provided by Jean-Jaques Tarbès. Moving around Paris is, as always, a pleasure, though the compositions are inferior to those in the Melville-Delon movies.

The DVD image, sound, and subtitles are all fine. The trailer is only in French (no subtitles available). There is a photo gallery and trailers for the other movies in "the Alain Delon collection" (some of which have English versions.)

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BTW, two years later, Delon reprised the role of Roger Borniche in another movies drawn from Borniche's memoirs—and set two years earlier than the beginning of "Flic Story": "Le Gang" (without Tarbès). In all, Deray directed nine films with Delon. And Trintignant had gone to LA with Deray and Romy Scheider to join Ann-Margaret and Angie Dickinson) to play a hit-man in the 1972 "Outside Man."

©2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age