Ungleiches Duell

Adieu Poulet (or The French Detective for the English title) is the typical french police movie from the seventies. I remember watching it when I was a kid and enjoyed it more then than I did now. In those days there were just not that much of good movies, Adieu Poulet was one of the good ones. Nowadays we have so much more choices. I still like it though, and it's always nice to watch a movie with Lino Ventura and Patrick Dewaere, as both are no longer with us, Lino dies of a heart attack and Patrick Dewaere took his own life seven years after this movie. Dewaere was a promising actor but with a troubled mind, still it came as a shock when he commited suicide. Adieu Poulet has a good cast, the story is easy to follow and entertaining, maybe it didn't age that well but still it's worth a watch.

I saw this French cop/buddy film when it originally ran in New York City for a limited time. I still remember the basics. Lino Ventura was sensational as usual, his sardonic, mistrusting self, and Dewaere was great as his partner. They made an enjoyable team, something I can't say for most cop/buddy films. Dewaere took his own life just a few years later, a very sad finale for an excellent actor. I'd love to see this film again but it has never surfaced on tape or disc and never airs on TV. But no worries, with satellite, I have an endless pile of worthless crap movies to surf through while good films like this languish in a vault, forgotten.

In 1970 Jean Gabin, ranked 18th in the list of 'Greatest Frenchmen', appeared in 'La Horse', a lamentable opus by Pierre Granier-Deferre which even Gabin's presence could not save. A considerable improvement is this later film from the same director which stars Lino Ventura, who was destined to assume Gabin's mantle and is ranked 23rd.

Ventura plays Commissaire Verjeat, an avenging angel in true Dirty Harry mode whilst the inspired casting of Patrick Dewaere as his hot-headed assistant provides another fascinating variant on the tried and trusted filmic formula of established versus rising star. As well as possessing that indefinable something extra, both actors complement each other perfectly whilst the other side of the coin is represented by the morally vacuous characters that are played by Victor Lanoux, Claude Rich and Julien Guiomar.

This is one of the films generally credited with helping to establish the sub-genre known as 'neo-polar' which is characterised by punchy dialogue, taut editing, high body count, maximum machismo and minimal femininity. The basic subject matter is redeemed however by the typically French emphasis on character rather than plot.

Although 'La Horse' is pretty awful one must acknowledge the excellence of this director's other collaboration with Gabin, 'Le Chat'. The brilliant Dewaere went from strength to strength before his tragically early demise. Ventura is, as always, great value in this but to suggest, as one critic has done, that this film represents 'arguably his finest hour' is frankly, absolute nonsense, as this would mean overlooking 'L 'Armée des Ombres', 'Cadaveri eccelenti' and 'Garde a Vue'.

....were very trendy in France during the seventies ,in the wake of the events of May 68."Adieu Poulet" is a watchable ,if not particularly memorable effort in the field.

Lino Ventura and Patrick Dewaere -whose career had just begun and sadly would be short-lived- make a solid team .They have to fight against a far-right politician (of the P.R.U party (whose motto is "Moral and Order" ) played by Victor Lanoux.

The script was written by Francis Veber ("la Chèvre" "le Dîner de Cons" )and it was filmed on location in Rouen.Pierre Granier-Deferre made good "Cinema de Qualité".

"His face was his fortune" is one description of Lino Ventura, the former wrestler turned actor. In movies like The Sicilian Clan and Adieu Poulet, he played a tough cop as well as any actor on either side of the Atlantic. In Adieu Poulet, as Verjeat the cop on a mission, Ventura's character has almost everyone lined up against him: a cop killer, a political big shot in Rouen who has connections to the national government in Paris and, of course, Verjeat's superiors who consider him a loose cannon. Adieu Poulet already shows the decline in the French film industry from only a few years earlier, when French films were regularly shown in art house theaters in the United States. The production values of this movie are almost non-existent, the budget of this film must have been a tenth of The Sicilian Clan made six years earlier and financed by 20th Century Fox's French movie distribution company. That movie opened in the USA at the Sutton on 57th Street in NYC in 1970 and got a fairly wide release. Adieu Poulet was released in the USA in 1979, playing at the 68th Street Playhouse, where New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby gave the movie a bad review. Then oblivion for Adieu Poulet.

I was able to see the movie with subtitles only because eight years ago CUNY-TV used to show French movies on its cable channel, subtitles courtesy of Julia McPhail. Adieu Poulet's tale involves crooked politicians, the goons they hire to stamp out their opposition and even the operator of a whorehouse who says she has connections, so Verjeat had better lay off her, after an old customer drops dead in a bed with a built in vibrator. You know, the subject of whores, politicians distancing themselves from the deaths of civil servants and cover-ups of corruption are as timely now in New York City as over 30 years ago in Rouen.

Just look at the cover-up of the deaths of the two firefighters at the Deutsche Bank building fire in downtown Manhattan, where Fire Commissioner Scoppetta (who never spent a minute working as a firefighter) is protecting himself and his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, by demoting FDNY brass, convenient scapegoats for a fire at a building demolition project apparently being handled by a firm with organized crime ties. At least in Adieu Poulet, the crooked politicians know that the solution to the Verjeat problem is a promotion, not a demotion. In NYC, whether it is reports by firefighters of massive explosions at the WTC buildings on 9/11 or the giant arson fire at the abandoned Brooklyn rope factory warehouse (whose owner already had cleared out another building he owned with an arson fire) or the $75 million demolition fee paid to demolish the Deutsche Bank building, silence is golden.

But the tough cops played by Lino Ventura are fictional characters. In the real world, in New York City, arson investigators spend their time not investigating crime but chauffeuring Fire Commissioner Scoppetta to meetings. At least Lardatte, the scheming politician in Adieu Poulet, is not a double dipper like Scoppetta, who collects a big NYC government pension on top of his even bigger FDNY Commissioner salary and is only good at lying and covering up arson fires by connected real estate developers. Only in New York, not Rouen.