Fromage-ca! Les Flics!

Doulos--The Finger Man. Lippy Jean-Paul Belmondo, who first made crime pay as a pint-size Bogart in Breathless, now proves himself a magnum Cagney who can rough up a moll in vintage Chicago style. When Jean-Paul wants blonde Therese to rat on a pal, he slugs her, ties her wrists to her ankles, loops a belt around her neck and lashes it to a radiator pipe, gags her, decants a bottle of Haig & Haig over her while she's down, slugs her again. "Now sweetheart, baby, act sensibly," he coos. So she does. Later, the police find poor Therese under her wrecked Renault at the bottom of a cliff.

The rest of the plot, helas, acts nowhere near so sensibly. Belmondo plays the bland best friend of Maurice (Serge Reggiani), a ferret-faced hood who bumps off a fence to get the loot from the big Avenue Mozart jewel robbery. Then, on Maurice's next job, somebody tips the gendarmes. Who? Is Belmondo le doulos, the stoolie? It looks that way until Belmondo uses the Mozart swag to triple-cross a gangland czar, gets Maurice sprung from jail, and splits a pile of G notes with his old copain. It takes a long flashback to tie all the subplots together in time for a grisly finale.

Does anyone still care? Sure, a little. Director Jean-Pierre Melville keeps his expert cast zipping right along, pursued by a camera that emphasizes the gritty black-and-whites of his murderous milieu. Admittedly hooked on oldtime U.S. gangster movies, Melville manages to make Paris look like the back lot at Warner Brothers. Doulos, in consequence, seldom seems more than an ambitious hybrid, a gangland epic with Gaul.

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