The more I view of Delon, the more impressive he becomes. In POUR LA PEAU D’UN FLIC, he directs as well as writes, produces and stars. He’s no Orson Welles. The film is but efficient fun. But he’s a lot savvier about driving a film to success than Welles ever was, and this was a big hit.

The film is a very cinephile one, with references to Cukor and his  HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS and LES GIRLS. We also see posters for DESERT FURY, THE BANDWAGON and many others. The most interesting aspect of the film is that it is already evidence of a certain playful postmodern turn.

George Cukor, connasse!

The film is a traditional polar based on a novel by Jean-Patrick Machette, just like TROIS HOMMES À ABBATRE, so there’s crime, and corruption, money laundering and drug deals. But here the darkness of TROIS HOMMES À ABBATRE is leavened by a comic tone. We see the kinds of quip-after-a-horror that we’d only see later in American cinema, with Schwarzenegger as the most famous practitioner.

It’s very self-referential of the genre and of Delon’s own star persona; Mireille Darc, his current girlfriend, makes a cameo and is insulted by a driver calling her by the name of oneJean of her films – LA GRANDE SAUTERELLE (above); Annie Parillaud, his future girlfriend, tells Delon how much more elegantly Belmondo reacts to pain (below).

The film also evidences the beginnings of a change in form that would be exacerbated through the eighties, not so much here by the way it intersperses the action (though that too, see below), but by the deployment of a soundtrack score (Crystal Gayle, Neil Diamond and many others, with Oscar Benton’s Bensonhurt Blues becoming a big hit), that requires a different kind of incorporation into the narrative and into the action. It’s a very enjoyable and interesting film.

The film is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville

José Arroyo