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The boilerplate American title (Dirty Money) fortuitously elucidates the connection to L'Argent, an equally concentrated schwanengesang. The robbery of a seaside bank is the finish of the steadily abstracting line running through Jean-Pierre Melville's work, pale Hokusai lighting and trenchcoated figures barely visible through a drizzly windshield comprise the distillation. The chief gangster (Richard Crenna) owns a Parisian nightclub, his friend the police superintendent (Alain Delon) patrols the streets and drops by to play the piano, the tinkling summons the cultivated moll (Catherine Deneuve), the third side of the triangle (cf. Lewis' The Big Combo). Buried loot, Christmas lights in the void. The centerpiece is a heist on a night train, the thief drops in from a helicopter, changes from jumpsuit to robe and slippers, combs his hair and uses a magnet to pick a lock—all ritual, silently and ceremoniously observed. "The job makes us skeptical." "Especially about being skeptical." Aesthetic appreciation at the pederast's mansion, trompe-l'oeil at the museum, more than ever a city of the living dead. ("L'armée des morts anonymes" is indicated.) Mysterious champ contre champ, the cop opposite a slain hooker and the hood opposite Van Gogh's self-portrait. Deneuve in nurse uniform with lethal syringe goes into Frankenheimer's Black Sunday, a drop of raw emotion elsewhere with the transvestite informant (Valérie Wilson) in fur coat and runny mascara. Everything points to the disintegration of Melville's loyalty motif, all but evaporated on both sides of the chase. (Delon bursts in on a wretched accomplice and waits an extra moment so he can blow his brains out in the bathroom.) Icy perfection is the epitaph, just a street in the morning, empty but for red signals and numb eyes and Vidocq's "ambiguïté et dérision." With Riccardo Cucciolla, Michael Conrad, Paul Crauchet, André Pousse, and Jean Desailly.
--- Fernando F. Croce |