Les assassins de l'ordre

I love Jacques Brel , and I appreciated this work in the film of Michel Carné. A film proposing the spirit of French Mai 1968. And a vulnerable hero front to a heavy , in its perverted mechanisms , justice system. A honest film, beautiful performances, fair portraits of idealism, expected, in some measure , film. Admirable image of the single father and his not easy relation with his son, beautiful small stories as parts of the large embroidery and the touch of the tension in smart way. For many reasons, a refuge for contemporary public.

I would have never bet a dime on Marcel Carné for directing this film. Never. This amazing film maker had his peak during the thirties, forties and nothing in the sixties and seventies. Nothing special, I mean. All his great classics were made during his first part of career. Here, Jacques Brel seems to work under André Cayatte's direction, maybe because I already know he was directed by Cayatte before. Anyway, I had the feeling to watch a Cayatte's topic and also inspired by a Sidney Lumet's movie. Justice, court, police - cops - which task is not always that impeccable for the paxpayer. A fierce, nearly brutal, plot that Yves Boisset would have liked, because so close to his favourite topics.

Here the director is Marcel Carne, the director of 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), one of the world's great films and on everybody's list of best ever. He also made 'Hotel du Nord' and 'Quai des Brunes', both in 1938, and he is a mega-force in the history of cinema. It is common for people to deride his later films, but this one is a powerful, bold and courageous one. It starts quietly, and even seems to be a rather bland detective film at first. But that is deceptive. Alas, the film having been made in Eastmancolour, it has faded a lot, and looks wan, which does not help the dramatic impact. But if you stick with this one with its slow, methodical beginning, it turns into a vehement attack upon French official corruption, which was as bold a thing to do just after 1968 as it was tricky to direct movies under the Vichy regime in the forties. He even has the students peacefully protesting in the streets. We have here a meticulous, surgical dissection of every detail of how corruption operates in French society. The main character, played just right by Jacques Brel, with his shy smile, is of what is known as an 'investigating magistrate'. American and British viewers won't understand the processes at work here, because this all takes place under the Napoleonic legal code. An investigating magistrate (who somewhat resembles an American grand jury, but is just one person) summons suspects and interrogates them, and then decides whether to bring an indictment or not, and either does or does not do so. He is a special kind of judge. This is so alien to British practice as to be incomprehensible. (The best portrayal in literature of this investigative magistrate process is the 1928 novel 'The Mauritzius Case' by Jacob Wassermann.) Brel fearlessly decides to investigate the case of a man brutally beaten to death in police custody while being interrogated. French officaldom is so fantastically corrupt (as we all now know, with the revelations about Mitterand and Chirac for instance) that the tentacles are everywhere, and we see them here: the man's son is framed, his wife is framed, everything that can be done to stop him investigating 'the Establishment' is portrayed blow by blow. If Carne was unpopular with the powers that be before this, he was now truly a 'non-person', after daring to show all of this to the public in graphic detail. It is as much 'in your face' as you can get. Probably there have been active attempts to make sure that we all forget and never see this film. So anyone who wants to beat the system should seek it out, if only for its bravery and challenge, by way of inspiration. Now, the role of 'the enforcers' is expanding and becoming so sinister that even the Stasi could never have dreamt of such total dominance of surveillance and control. Here we see the primitive 1971 version of the police state, the psychology of which is the same, even though the identities have been changed to expose the guilty.

Among the poor Carné's production of the sixties / seventies,"Les Assassins de l'Ordre" is certainly the most watchable.A story of a judge (Brel) investigating Police corruption ,it looks like an André Cayatte work .Like in the latter's contemporary effort ("Mourir d' Aimer" ) you can feel the May 68 zeitgeist all through the movie.It badly dates the work ,and the students demonstrations were already cinema clichés.Carné's directing is sometimes ponderous but the actors survive :Jacques Brel ,Michael Lonsdale,Catherine Rouvel and Charles Denner are all excellent.

Note:Didier Haudepin,who plays the judge's son, was once the marvelous Alexandre in Jean Delannoy's overlooked "Les Amitiés Particulières" (1964).

In 1971, when he directed 'Les assassins de l'ordre' starring Jacques Brel, Marcel Carne had passed his heyday. The French director had directed several remarkable films that remained as milestones in the history of French cinema in the period before the Second World War, one during the war and a few more in the years immediately after the war. After the 1950s, inspiration seemed to have abandoned him, and the films that followed were almost all failures with critics and audiences in an effervescent French cinema that revolted against the 'classical cinema' he symbolised together with a few other. With 'Les assassins de l'ordre' Marcel Carne was trying, at the age of 65, to return, addressing a political issue echoing the student riots that shook France in May 1968. The results of this attempt are not very conclusive. He made his political stand by the side of the younger generations, but his film-making seemed overcome by events. It was to be his penultimate feature film, and yet the most interesting film of the last decades of his career.

The film's script combines the themes of police violence and corruption of justice with the courtroom drama. The film's hero, Bernard Level, is an investigating judge, this position of magistrate being an original French institution with extensive powers of investigation and prosecution, non-existent in many other countries. The responsibility also involves risks, and the judge Level will need courage if he wants to reveal the truth in the case of a detainee who died in detention and send the police officers who appear responsible for this death in front of the jury. The legal and police systems work hand in hand, protect their servants, consider police violence as a legitimate method in the fight against criminals and deaths in detention as work accidents. The judge will face not only his superiors but also the police officers who are exerting pressure on his close family, including his student son, a representative of the '68 generation. Justice is difficult to reach and injustice accentuates the crisis of trust between the new generations and the state institutions.

In order to increase the public's interest, Marcel Carne distributed Jacques Brel, a very popular singer and songwriter, who was beginning to build an acting career in addition to the musical one. Brel proves here real qualities of dramatic actor in a role reminiscent of those that Jean-Louis Trintignan was creating in the same period. We can only regret that he would only appear in a few other films, because after a few years the cancer that took him too young would be discovered. I think he would have had a remarkable career in film. Among those who partnered in the cast I noticed Michael Lonsdale, an actor who recently left us and whose work I really liked, who in this film plays the role of the corrupt police inspector. However, the main problem of the film is the script, both as a structure and as dialogues. The plot is too transparent and too predictable, and the characters recite (even outside the court) too much rhetoric and leave too little room for personal feelings, fears, doubts. For all its weaknesses, 'Les Assassins de l'ordre' is still a film worth watching and rewatching, both for Brel and Lonsdale, but also for the clarity of exposition and the fluidity of the narration characteristic of Marcel Carne's films.