Cop or Hood (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Georges LautnerRelease Date(s)
1979 (October 14, 2025)Studio(s)
Cerito Films/Gaumont (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
The career of the greatly-missed Jean-Paul Belmondo (1933-2021) seemed to fall neatly into three distinct categories. He starred in artful films for great directors, particularly during the height of the French New Wave: in Breathless and Pierrot le Fou for Godard, Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques, Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest, Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid. But he also headlined popular mainstream films, often displaying his Buster Keaton-like willingness to do dangerous stunts, in movies like the Keaton-esque That Man from Rio and, a personal favorite, the gritty The Professional. However, like American contemporary Clint Eastwood, he sometimes indulged in aimless vehicles seemingly designed solely to showcase his incredibly cool and emphatically French screen persona (unlike Alain Delon and others, he generally avoided English-language productions), movies such as Le Magnifique and Cop or Hood, the Belmondo equivalents of Every Which Way but Loose and The Rookie. On the other hand, one can’t argue with success; this $2.3 million production made $29.6 million at the box-office, more than ten times its cost.
Cop or Hood (Flic ou voyou, “Cop or Corrupt Cop?”) is like a jumble of Belmondo charm vigorously stirred with lesser Dirty Harry and Roger Moore-era Bond components. Belmondo’s character blows things up, torches a café, makes love to a beautiful woman, drives around in luxurious cars, gambles in a casino, wisecracks, fights with his superiors on the police force, has cute moments with his teenage daughter, and so forth. It’s all well done so far as that goes, but the Yojimbo-inspired plot is almost hopelessly confusing, though maybe that’s beside the point.
Belmondo plays Stanislas “Stan” Borowitz, a divisional commissioner for the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale (IGPN), exposing corrupt cops. He’s sent to Nice following the murder of a corrupt commissioner and a prostitute at a hotel, which is somehow linked to a turf war between gangsters Théodore Musard (Georges Géret) and Corsican Achille Volfoni (Claude Brosset). Using the alias Antonio Cerruiti, like Toshiro Mifune’s bad-good guy in Yojimbo, Stan sets one crime organization against the other, though this is complicated by two corrupt cops on Volfoni’s payroll, Rey (Tony Kendall) and Massard (Jean-François Balmer), whose allegiance seems to blow with the wind.
In the course of this, Stan becomes acquainted with beautiful Edmonde Puget-Rostand (Marie Laforêt), Stan enjoying her huge mansion in the French Riviera, he inviting his 14-year-old daughter Charlotte (Julie Jézéquel) to join them. The daughter might as well have “future kidnap victim” stamped on her forehead.
In one sense this largely incoherent parade of set pieces is pretty insufferable, but Belmondo flashes that trademark grin a lot, the locations are pleasant, and those set pieces are somewhat entertaining in their absurdity, much like those in the Roger Moore-era Bond films. As he did for years on the Bond films, stunt driver/arranger Remy Julienne whips up some impressive action. Belmondo carries an enormous .357 revolver like Dirty Harry, drives (and sometimes blows up) luxurious cars (including a vintage Lotus convertible and a gold Rolls-Royce) and on and on.
One suspects the makers of (the original) The Naked Gun may have been inspired by one set piece particularly, when Stan commandeers an automobile from a driving school, the instructor already in the passenger seat, awaiting a student. What follows is a wild, comical chase, a clear predecessor to same thing in The Naked Gun. In Cop or Hood, Stan has zero regard for proper police procedures, rights of the accused or anything else, making Harry Callahan (or, for that matter, Frank Drebin) rank amateurs by comparison. He’s a one-man army, “the dry cleaner” as he’s nicknamed. Everything in the film is extravagantly overdone; even Edmonde dog is a giant mastiff with colossal testicles, which catch the loving eye of director Georges Lautner’s camera lens.
No matter how frustrating Cop or Hood is to watch, its appealing elements sort of win out in the end. Belmondo seems to be enjoying himself, and that enjoyment is reasonably well conveyed to the movie audience. Julie Jézéquel is quite charming as the daughter; she’s enjoyed a long acting career as an adult ever since. Jean-François Balmer is also good as the morally conflicted Massard.
The musical score by Philippe Sarde is also good, augmented by trumpet playing by, of all people, Chet Baker.
Kino’s new Blu-ray, derived from a 2K restoration by StudioCanal, probably for their 2020 Blu-ray release in France, offers a solid video transfer in 1.66:1 widescreen. There are a lot of split-screen shots at the beginning that are a little grainy, but overall the presentation has good color and contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio (French only, in 2.0 mono), is excellent, with optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region “A” encoded.
Extras are limited to a trailer (showing every explosion, naturally), and an audio commentary track by busy historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson. They’re doing so many of these things the track is rather light on film-specific behind-the-scenes information and is more like a watch party for lonely cinephiles.
Not particularly good but certainly watchable, Cop or Hood is recommended for undemanding fans of mindless French action films.
- Stuart Galbraith IV