Adieu Poulet (or The French Detective for the English title) is the typical french police movie from the seventies. I remember watching it when I was a kid and enjoyed it more then than I did now. In those days there were just not that much of good movies, Adieu Poulet was one of the good ones. Nowadays we have so much more choices. I still like it though, and it's always nice to watch a movie with Lino Ventura and Patrick Dewaere, as both are no longer with us, Lino dies of a heart attack and Patrick Dewaere took his own life seven years after this movie. Dewaere was a promising actor but with a troubled mind, still it came as a shock when he commited suicide. Adieu Poulet has a good cast, the story is easy to follow and entertaining, maybe it didn't age that well but still it's worth a watch.

Cop movie was truly a big part of French cinema in the 60's and the 70's. And this one is true to the genre. Granier-Deferre is able to make us care for commissaire Vergeat, the cop who's ready to use unorthodox ways to catch the bad guy. But Vergeat's way of doing things gets him into trouble. He's got to play politics. Ah! poor Vergeat!

One last thing: Lino Ventura does a terrific job playing the commissaire.

Out of 100, I give Adieu Poulet 82. That's good for *** out of ****.

Seen at home, in Toronto, on September 11th, 2002.

"His face was his fortune" is one description of Lino Ventura, the former wrestler turned actor. In movies like The Sicilian Clan and Adieu Poulet, he played a tough cop as well as any actor on either side of the Atlantic. In Adieu Poulet, as Verjeat the cop on a mission, Ventura's character has almost everyone lined up against him: a cop killer, a political big shot in Rouen who has connections to the national government in Paris and, of course, Verjeat's superiors who consider him a loose cannon. Adieu Poulet already shows the decline in the French film industry from only a few years earlier, when French films were regularly shown in art house theaters in the United States. The production values of this movie are almost non-existent, the budget of this film must have been a tenth of The Sicilian Clan made six years earlier and financed by 20th Century Fox's French movie distribution company. That movie opened in the USA at the Sutton on 57th Street in NYC in 1970 and got a fairly wide release. Adieu Poulet was released in the USA in 1979, playing at the 68th Street Playhouse, where New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby gave the movie a bad review. Then oblivion for Adieu Poulet.

I was able to see the movie with subtitles only because eight years ago CUNY-TV used to show French movies on its cable channel, subtitles courtesy of Julia McPhail. Adieu Poulet's tale involves crooked politicians, the goons they hire to stamp out their opposition and even the operator of a whorehouse who says she has connections, so Verjeat had better lay off her, after an old customer drops dead in a bed with a built in vibrator. You know, the subject of whores, politicians distancing themselves from the deaths of civil servants and cover-ups of corruption are as timely now in New York City as over 30 years ago in Rouen.

Just look at the cover-up of the deaths of the two firefighters at the Deutsche Bank building fire in downtown Manhattan, where Fire Commissioner Scoppetta (who never spent a minute working as a firefighter) is protecting himself and his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, by demoting FDNY brass, convenient scapegoats for a fire at a building demolition project apparently being handled by a firm with organized crime ties. At least in Adieu Poulet, the crooked politicians know that the solution to the Verjeat problem is a promotion, not a demotion. In NYC, whether it is reports by firefighters of massive explosions at the WTC buildings on 9/11 or the giant arson fire at the abandoned Brooklyn rope factory warehouse (whose owner already had cleared out another building he owned with an arson fire) or the $75 million demolition fee paid to demolish the Deutsche Bank building, silence is golden.

But the tough cops played by Lino Ventura are fictional characters. In the real world, in New York City, arson investigators spend their time not investigating crime but chauffeuring Fire Commissioner Scoppetta to meetings. At least Lardatte, the scheming politician in Adieu Poulet, is not a double dipper like Scoppetta, who collects a big NYC government pension on top of his even bigger FDNY Commissioner salary and is only good at lying and covering up arson fires by connected real estate developers. Only in New York, not Rouen.