Police Python 357 (Alain Corneau, 1976)

 

One might approach Alain Corneau’s Police Python 357 with some trepidation given that seemingly gun-stroking title, an impression bolstered by the fetishistic opening titles, and by the knowledge that while the film casts Yves Montand (an irresistible presence throughout) as Inspector Marc Ferrot, the proud owner of the titular weapon (he even makes his own bullets), it saddles his real-life wife Simone Signoret with the far less dynamic role of a largely bed-ridden old schemer whose husband (Francois Perier, playing Ferrot’s boss Ganay) openly maintains a much younger mistress. Early on, the film may also seem overly reliant on coincidence, as the young woman, Silvia (Stefania Sandrelli) starts seeing Ferrot as well, each man becoming aware that he’s not the only one, but unaware of the other’s identity; when Ganay murders Silvia, the prime suspect is the unidentified man that neighbours and others most recently saw her with, entailing that Ferrot is effectively assigned to track down himself. But Corneau keeps things unpredictable, and slyly subverts expectations throughout, intercutting Sylvia’s murder with a goofy scene of a drunk Ferrot opening the back of a parked truck to release its cargo of pigs, and later having Ferrot (for whom the affair seems to have been a radical deviation from a buttoned-down existence) go to extremes to avoid being in the same room with witnesses whom he knows will recognize him, first by barging into a heated group of strikers and getting himself beaten up, and later by throwing acid onto his own face and permanently disfiguring himself. The finale showcases Ferrot’s personal courage and marksmanship, but any sense of triumph is by then heavily offset by the character’s diminished physical, professional and psychic state; likewise, Montand and Signoret only really have one scene together, an extremely bleak one that subverts any likely expectation for such a star pairing.