Policier Brutality

One of the pleasures of being off work is that I get the chance to sit up half the night watching favourite films on DVD. We're not talking classics here - just various films which, for one reason or another, I've grown fond of and never seem to tire of watching. The other night, armed with some beer and peanuts, I found myself watching my all-time favourite French policier starring Jean-Paul Belmondo: Le Marginal. An edited English language version of this used to turn up quite frequently in the all night TV schedules under the title The Outsider back in the late 1990s. It's typical of the kind of action movie Belmondo was turning out in the 1980s. As usual, Belmondo is a tough rogue cop who is prepared to break all the rules to put his adversary - a smarmy drug baron played by veteran Hollywood bad guy Henry Silva - behind bars. It features everything you'd expect from such an outing: Belmondo beating up suspects, romancing prostitutes, being shouted at by his boss and exiled to the worst precinct in Paris, plus a great car chase involving a 1969 Mustang.

All highly entertaining - especially the sequence where Belmondo takes time out from his investigations to hunt down and beat the shit out of a pair of pimps who had cut his hooker girlfriend for consorting with a cop, they appear to be the only people in Paris who have never heard of Belmondo's character and his reputation for violence - but this time around, something about the film kept niggling at me. You see, I've also been watching the third series of Spiral on BBC4, which has reminded me that in France police investigations are directed by an Examining Magistrate. Curiously, at no point during Le Marginal does Belmondo ever consult a Judge before beating the shit out of a group of Turkish immigrants he suspects of being drug mules. Consequently, I couldn't help but imagine Judge Roban, the relatively mild-mannered Examining Magistrate in Spiral, having to deal with Belmondo's Commisaire Jordan. The image of Belmondo swaggering into Roban's office in his black leather jacket, before slumping in a chair and resting his feet on the edge of the Judge's desk, is strangely compelling. He'd probably end up slapping the Judge around in order to get a warrant allowing him to beat up a suspect. That said, Judge Roban himself has been turning a bit rogue himself in recent episodes - staging a break-in at his office to cover-up the fact that he'd leaked information about a case to the press. Next thing, he'll be beating up the Chief Prosecutor...