Un Flic (1972)

A burned out police detective (Alain Delon) is friends with a nightclub owner (Richard Crenna), who is also a master thief. When a bank robbery on the French seacoast occurs, it will eventually lead to a final confrontation between the two friends. There is also a woman (Catherine Deneuve) that stands between them. The final film of the great director Jean Pierre Melville is a chilly dispassionate exercise in style. Delon's police detective is cold and unlikable so our (or at least my) empathy is with the bad guys. Crenna's master criminal and his crew (Michael Conrad and Riccardo Cucciolla among them) are much more sympathetic. Perhaps that's Melville's point, that police work inevitably wears down one's humanity. Deneuve is underused, she's merely "the girl" so I assume she took the thankless part just for the chance to work with Melville. The film is all in blues, grays and silvers and Walter Wottitz's (an Oscar winner for THE LONGEST DAY) cinematography is gorgeous. In particular, the opening bank heist which takes place in a stormy beach town. With Jean Desailly (Truffaut's THE SOFT SKIN) as a homosexual robbed by a hustler and Valerie Wilson as a transvestite who bear the brunt of the film's homophobia.