Without Apparent Motive

... and his best.All that he made afterward can easily be dismissed as rubbish.A journalist -he also wrote words for some songs- he dreamed of the American cinema because he spent some of his youth on the other side of the pond.

Actually,we're closer to Agatha Christie's whodunit than to American film noir.It's not a problem.It's better to have a good imitation of a detective story à la "and then there were none" than a pale reflection of Wise or Hawks.One by one,people who did something nasty in the past are slain and detective Trintignant is here to solve the mystery ,a mystery which entertains the audience till the very end .Outside Trintignant,the cast is very odd,including French crooner Sacha Distel,as an emcee of a stupid radio contest (a wonderful spoof) ,Segal, who wrote "love story" ,Chabrol's then-wife (and ex-wife of Trintignant)and best actress Stephane Audran,Italian not yet sex symbol Laura Antonelli ,here cast against type,Jean-Pierre Marielle...

Very entertaining.

I had seen this film in a cinema, years ago, when I was a youngster. Now, I have bought the video in a 2nd hand shop, and...

I has been delighted again with:

a) The plot: good thriller about a snipper who kills several high society persons.

b) The actors: Jean-Louis Trintigant is superb as a policeman,engaged in a difficult case. And he runs top speed...

c) The music: Morricone's score is perfect. It goes along very well and underline top moments.

To summarize: highly commandable film.

The movie is based on a book by McBain. Never having read the book I can't comment on the fidelity of the adaptation. However, the movie deals with some themes dear to McBain's heart : the difficulty and responsibility of detective work ; the speed at which a problem can turn into a circus, a stampede or a political affair ; the difficulty of policing a modern city where almost all citizens (good or bad) can hide, morph and reinvent themselves. (If you're living in a large city : would you be willing to swear that the kindly gentleman sitting on a park bench and feeding the pigeons is indeed a retired high school teacher, and not an Israeli spy master or a judo instructor kicked out of the Navy Seals for excessive brutality ?) There is also a nicely satirical edge to the work.

The translation to French society works well and the sun-drenched city of Nice is nicely juxtaposed with the relentlessly "noir" atmosphere. The masterful Morricone music evokes a general sense of wrongness and menace.

It should be noted that Trintignant's inspector Carella is not an agreeable man : he alternates between gruff boorishness and solitary misanthropy, while exuding a smoldering, barely contained anger. One senses that any pimply teenager foolish enough to go "oink, oink" in his vicinity would become the owner of a bullet through the brain in two minutes flat. As an approach to community police work this would not be entirely without merit - but still.

... Nice (impossible to miss that title, hey Hugh and JJ?)

If Philippe Labro isn't a great film noir director like Melville or Corneau, his polars are however entertaining. There are some very fine scenes in "Sans Mobile Apparent", pop and sexy like an italian criminal movie. In fact, it's quite close to giallo, with a terrible secret surrounding the killings in that privileged town of Nice, but these killings are made with a rifle by a sniper. Philippe Labro was mainly a journalist and he covered the most well known sniper story, Kennedy's killing. Labro loved guns and rifles, we feel it in this movie.



What bothers me is that Labro shot that polar as a cinephile, giving Trintignant some Bogart gestures like Godard with Belmondo in "Breathless", and those few new wave quotes are rather painful to me, Trintignant's character should have been more worked, he is too much stereotyped, sometimes being too much without explanation. But the sulfurous 70s atmosphere is great, the girls are sexy (Audran, Sanda, Gravina) and master Morricone's score is sumptuous.

Philippe Labro must love "the Sniper" by Edward Dmytryk.

An exceptional movie construction, masterminding the script, the actors, the music and the location. Each scene, per day and murder, and each actor's performance leave vivid pictures in my mind: the plunge in the swimming-pool, the deceived look of Gravina in her love-sex affair with Trintignant, the full power run of Trintignant around the Nice harbor, the final death posture of the murderer. Jean-Louis Trintignant camps a local French Riviera inspector, very self-image oriented as are most of the featured residents of the Cote d'Azur. A series of murders with no evident link is followed by Trintignant, each one filling a piece of the puzzle and bringing him closer to the murderer. Labro, the film director, shoots real-street-life and picks up the best essence of each of his actors. Beyond Trintignant, each other actor seems to have the second role while playing their cast with their own personality. Labro could have been another Jean-Pierre Melville and his magnificent "Le Cercle Rouge". This "Sans Mobile Apparent" showed all the promising ingredients needed by the French cinema to find a respected place in action movies. Labro followed up with "l'Heritier", not bad, far not as good, the magic having disappeared. My biggest regret: "Sans Mobile Apparent" is as yet unavailable in DVD and does not play on TV anymore.