Max and the Junkmen

 Claude Sautet's Max and the Junkmen (1971) wasn't released in the United States until 2012 and, then, was unnoticed.  The film is ostensibly a French crime picture, although, in fact, something much more perverse.  The movie is unobtrusively shot, edited for clarity, and seems overlit -- it has the appearance of a very well-made TV movie of the period.  The mixture of close-ups and longer shots is classically devised and there is nothing really picturesque about any of the imagery.  Compared to the histrionic lighting in something like The Godfather, Max and the Junkmen is bland and clinical.  Yet the film is impressive, features a couple of extraordinary performances, and, on its own terms, just about perfect.  But what are those terms?  The influence of Georges Simenon on French crime films can't be overestimated and I think of the picture as a sort of film dur, the movie equivalent to Simenon's bleak Roman dur (or "hard" novels) -- the portrait of life that emerges from this film is grim, unrelenting, and bitter.

Max is a detective working for the Paris police force.  (Max is played by Michel Piccoli -- he looks gaunt and cadaverous, with his face tinted a greenish pallor; the man looks like some sea creature that lives on the bottom of the ocean.)  Max is upset that a big-time criminal has evaded his efforts at capture and, in fact, added insult to injury by murdering the police informant.  While shaking down a shady used car dealer, Max notices a cheerful two-bit criminal in the shop.  He tails the crook and, then, asks him for a light to make contact.  The crook is an old army buddy named Abel who is now working as a car thief at a salvage yard that fences stolen metals.  The crook admits his low-grade criminal enterprise to Max, not knowing that the man is a detective.  Max is interested in making a bust on the basis of fool-proof and iron-clad evidence.  He meets with another detective named Rosinsky who is responsible for policing Nanterre, a shabby suburb of Paris, where Abel lives.  It turns out that Abel is involved with five other crooks in a chop-shop.  The crooks are all career criminals and, in fact, come from bottom-feeder underworld families -- one of them, a killer, is the son of man who was guillotined; the others are penny-ante pimps or the sons of prostitutes; some of them seem mentally retarded.  Despite their foibles, the crooks are doing okay, seem to be happy with the profits from their petty pilfering, and have prostitute girlfriends who are both loyal and hard-working.  Abel's girlfriend is a German prostitute named Lily played by Romy Schneider -- she's the most attractive of the girls and reigns over them "like a queen."  For reasons that are inscrutable because, in fact, probably insane, Max sets out to entrap the entire gang in a bank robbery -- a criminal enterprise that is far beyond their skill-set.  We learn that Max is independently wealthy, was once a Judge in Lyons, and abandoned that profession to become a cop when he had to release a murderer since the evidence against the man was legally inadequate.  Max is now on a crusade to make a collar that will be a lead-pipe cinch in court.  He uses his own resources to rent a plush apartment, pours money into seducing Lily and earning her trust, and, then, plants in her mind a caper that she, obligingly, conveys to the crooks, inspiring them to plan a big armed robbery (these crooks typically don't use weapons) on a bank that Max pretends that he owns.  From beginning to end, the entire heist is Max's creation, a crime that is completely beyond the aspirations of the petty thieves surrounding Abel.  Of course, the outcome of the bank robbery is disastrous for Abel and his gang -- a couple of them get gunned down and the others are all caught red-handed.  Rosinsky doesn't like what Max has done -- after all, he had his eagle-eye on these crooks and knew that they were essentially harmless.  Rosinsky, then, insists upon prosecuting Lily as an accessory to the crime to punish Max for his misdeeds.  Max has developed feelings for the beautiful hooker and is outraged that Rosinsky is going to prosecute her.  So he kills Rosinsky in the station house and goes to jail with the crooks that he has entrapped.

The film has the feeling of a nightmarish parable.  Max is less like Dirty Harry Callahan or Inpector Columbo than Melville's murderous and obsessed Captain Ahab.  The movie is shot in icy greens and blues except for the scenes at the junkyard that have a peculiar paradoxically idyllic and colorful appearance.  Romy Schneider is hardened and cynical, but extremely attractive and she's an enigmatic character like Max.  The two never have sex; their intimacy is like that of an old married couple but the tragedy in the film is that Max and Lily are, in fact, in love.  Sautet describes the film as "a study in the perversity of theoreticians."  Max and his oddly complicit boss are "theoreticians" of crime and detection -- the more humane Rosinski is just a technician.  At the heart of the picture are two indelible performances:  Piccoli and Schneider:  they carry the film and make it seem close to flawless.