Melville said, in relation to Le Doulos, that his cops have "that layer of cynicism and vulgarity which all policemen acquire after associating with crooks for a certain number of years." Alain Delon, who embodied the Melville crook, plays the Melville cop better than anyone. He is an impassive but harried Paris cop who shares drinks and a girlfriend (Catherine Deneuve) with a nightclub owner pal (the American actor Richard Crenna, nicely cast), who robs banks and runs drugs on the side. The classic Melvillian elements are here more abstractly inscribed than ever in cuts and moody eyeline matches, from a bank heist in a stormy seaside suburb to a gang meeting amid a gallery of Van Goghs, and the fatal hospital visit which harks back ironically to the faked medical mission in The Army in the Shadows. The elaborate setpiece in which a train robbery is conducted by helicopter is Hitchcockian in the morbidly amusing accuracy of detail, and even in the evident fakery of the models used. "It is curiously fitting that Melville's last feature should reaffirm the genre's hardiest conventions in a context of disenchantment and failure; and happy that this final, equivocal embrace of the genre should be distinguished by the director's most adventurous experiments with form." (Tony Rayns)