The Judge and the Assassin (1976)

The leads are both very good—Noiret being perhaps the best of the two …--yet without having much stuff to play. The two central characters are poorly written, with not much intrinsic interest. I expected—I must confess—a thrilling hunt game—a wild hunt, in an ever accelerating pace; a savage confrontation of energies—or, at least, a game of subtlety, intelligence, wit and cunning. Yet, the film is but a police procedural, too well performed by Noiret and Galabru; the truth is that this crap director did not deserve such actors. The characters remain unexplained, unexplored and indifferent to the viewer, despite the prodigious art of Galabru and Noiret. While Noiret elegantly, impassibly exercised his mastery, Galabru looked very willing to invest, to create, to find his character's life ….The director is inept, the script is crap. THE JUDGE AND THE ASSASSIN has nor the excitement of a larger—than—life manhunt ,neither that of an abundant deploy of intelligence, shrewdness, intuition, psychology. The whole movie is wrong—wrong from the concept. It amounts to no more than a police procedural, without excitement, atmosphere or suspense. It also ends on a dignified crap note of social vindication. The viewer has the feeling, the perception that everything in this movie was irrelevant, insipid. No excitement, of whatever kind; no life, that is,in it,and no valid creation. Only a pretentious leftist police procedural. The actors are first—hand, Noiret reopens the drawer with ambiguous, eerie characters (his character here is not without reminding the one in LA GRANDE BOUFFE);yet the movie does not find its tone—that is, the director does not find the film's tone.

The judge and the assassin is a strange and ironic title for this film. It does not represent what your mind immediately leads you to believe. It is about the arrest and trial of a psychopath, alas French auteur style. It bears in odd-about way a resemblance to Lacombe Lucien which was released two years earlier. Featuring a bravura performance by Michel Galabru ( he worn the Cesar, the French Oscar) as the serial killer, his trial becomes a study into the mind and evil of nation at the turn of the last century. Dealing with anti-semitism, civil unrest, disobedience and the tyranny of the France and the Church can make anyone crazy and an assassin. With strong performances by Tavernier favorite actor Philippe Noiret and a young Isabelle Huppert, it is a fine film in the tradition of French cinema prior to the advent of the New Wave.

Michel Galabru got the highest french award for his role in this movie, the "Cesar du meilleur acteur". Galabru became then one of the greatest actor in France.Either in comedy or in tragedy (see "Le gendarme" and "L'été meurtrier".

A French provincial town in the late 1890's where a Judge attempts to advance his political power by trying to prove that a soldier was not insane at the time of committing murder, which means soilder gets the guillotine and not the mad house. A movie that is more about the social turmoil in France.