Cops and Robbers

By Stefan Kanfer

At their closest, England and France are a scant 18 miles apart. But the emotional gap is virtually infinite. Take, for example, the reliable litmus of crime. As two new films demonstrate, the accounts of evildoer and pursuant vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game--a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition.

The Villain is Richard Burton, playing a closet-queen gang leader named Vic Dakin. Alternately brutal and simpering, Dakin is the sort of chap who, when revealed as a multiple killer, is described by his neighbors as "a quiet, unassuming man" and whose unbelieving mother invariably laments: "But he always kept his room so clean." Vic, in fact, takes good care of his mum, conveying her to the Brighton sun, faithfully carrying in the afternoon tea. Between such assignments, he coshes opponents and irritably castrates a chap or two. In films like this, of course, there is no such thing as the perfect criminal. Errors will be committed and no one ever eludes the British dragnet.

Shot in color that may have been invented by Madame Tussaud and edited with a cleaver, The Villain is acceptable only as a glimpse of procedural tradition, the English bloodhound pursuing his accursed foe. Villain Burton's voice remains one of the most distinctive and controlled in the world. But he is no longer in charge of his face. The little piggy eyes glisten and swivel in a seamed and immobile background. Dissipation, alas, now seems less a simulacrum than a portrait.

Across the Channel, the change in mood and tense is more than linguistic. Un Conde (The Cop) plays the game of cops and robbers with the impact and subtlety of a .45 slug. Inspector Favenin (Michel Bouquet) has been censured for insubordination. Sullen, spiritually bankrupt, he blurs the distinction between criminal and keeper. When a young colleague is murdered, Favenin cracks. With deranged courage, he preempts the entire legal profession--cop, lawyer, judge, jury, executioner--and runs the gang to earth, ritualistically following the sanguinary vitality of the ancient Warner Bros, gangster movies.

Favenin's bloody vengeance is solidly based on the standard "Rogue Cop" caper--maligned by the Department, the lonely and disgraced lawman corrects what the courts cannot. The old films implicitly applauded such vigilante tactics, but The Cop is far more ambiguous in its moral stance. It does not discount the failings of a system that allows criminals to prance defiantly through their civil rites. But it also indicts the kind of police who have created an environment about which Raymond Chandler once commented: "When you pass in beyond the lights of a precinct station you pass out of this world, into a place beyond the law."

That environment is so tangibly recreated that The Cop was censored in France for alleged "brutality and distortion." Director Yves Boisset's pouting reply was no more original than his plot: "A country has the police force it deserves." By that deterministic token, a country also has the criminals--and for that matter, the movies--it deserves as well.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.