Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Caleb Whitney ... in France, of all places. Believe it or not, they actually showed this film on movie night in St. Martin de Re in southern France. I spent a few months there back in '83 as a temporary guest after an altercation with my book maker. First of all, Catherine DeNeuve is delicious in this film, as always. Depardieu is superb, playing Mickey Le Dingue with a subtle touch that none of us were expecting. Guards and inmates alike, we cried at the sad parts and cheered on the criminals at the crime parts. French prisons have gotten a lot of bad publicity of late due to the high suicide rate and the beatings or murders by the guards, and the knife attacks, and that's all true, but underneath the squalor and brutality and physical horror, there's beauty and art, and film and Mickey Le Dingue and Miss Deneuve. It was worth going to prison to see this movie.

Bob Taylor With Melville's death, Tavernier and Corneau became the masters of French film noir, but the latter has the dreamlike mood that the genre really needs to be effective. Le choix des armes has many effective scenes (usually involving either Depardieu or Lanvin) but sometimes leaves us cold. There is a little too much exposition in the storytelling--why show us Montand and his buddy smashing up the gang lord's opulent house when there is no dramatic effect to be gained? Or the elaborate four-way car pursuit (did the budget allow for all those stunt-drivers, so Corneau thought Why not?).The acting is mostly exceptional. The young Gérard Lanvin gives us a very frustrated young detective, Michel Galabru is his burnt-out superior, Richard Anconina plays a man trying to settle down to happy domesticity and failing, and Depardieu is simply great as Mickey le dingue, crazy and moving at the same time. The woman who plays Dany's wife with burning resentment takes over every scene she's in.

manuel-pestalozzi When I saw Yves Montand step outside his stately farm house in his gum boots I could not suppress a snort. From then on I was unable to take that character seriously (and that was pretty early into the movie). The whole set-up of the couple played by Montand and Catherine Deneuve seemed to me absolutely unrealistic and absurd. Horse breeding, buying the biggest mansion in Southern Ireland, while the (almost completely unrelated) story unfolds, come on! It is simply not possible to take that at face value as the movie apparently wants us to. If it was meant as an almost dreamlike fantasy, then it was a pretty corny one, if you ask me.Montand's acting occasionally had an odd goofball quality which at times came in handy (his great performance in Wages of Fear comes to mind). Here the goofball aspect plainly shines through, but with him as an ex gangster who has become some kind of landed gentry it is anything but an asset to the quality of the movie. I was really amazed to learn that Montand made Police Python 357 with the same director. It is a much better movie and he is brilliant there.So probably the script is the source of my dissatisfaction. The movie has lengths (a long, inconsequential sequence of a group of cars following another car, an elaborate smashing up of the living room of a fairly unimportant minor character). For Catherine Deneuve this must have been one of the most ungrateful roles in her distinguished career. She mainly drives up and down the access lane of the estate in a little Ford or sits in an anonymous hotel room waiting for her husband to call. Oh yes, there is some mare-trouble back at the farm, but that does not amount to much.It's strange, the character played by Gérard Depardieu is very convincing as human bulldozer who occasionally has a heart. I feel that this character was somehow let down by the script. He is the only driving force of the whole plot, the surroundings seem to be either passive or undecided. So he becomes undecided himself (and that's poison for a movie that is based on action). No wonder the guy turned into a raving maniac, come to think of it.

patrice vatan On the basis of a very traditional diagram, almost austere in its banality, Michel Grisolia, the scenario writer, gave his realizer a springboard from which this last built a true psychological drama, rich of subtle nuances and learnedly worked drafts. The police aspect interests less Corneau than the painting of the underworld, than the denunciation of the police methods or than the purulent proletarian company of today. The setting in scene is fantastic and remarkable is interpretation (Depardieu!), let us announce however a light Manicheism and certain doubtful psychological analyses.