cult film freak: MIMSY FARMER, JEAN GABIN & ALAIN DELON 'TWO MEN IN TOWN'

Mimsy Farmer and Michel Bouquet in TWO MEN IN TOWN Year: 1973 Rating: ***1/2

French New Wave director José Giovanni's TWO MEN IN TOWN is obviously inspired by Victor Hugo's LES MISÉRABLES, but for a 1970's crime fan it will be most reminiscent of the late-seventies STRAIGHT TIME starring Dustin Hoffman...

Based on a 1973 novel NO BEAST SO FIERCE (same year as this feature) by Edward Bunker, particularly the second-act plot-line involving a badgering police inspector, who had originally arrested bank robber Alain Delon for the ten years that social worker Jean Gabin gets him out early from in the film's semi-optimistic prelude...

Mimsy Farmer in TWO MEN IN TOWN

Hoffman battles M. Emmett Walsh's stubborn parole officer, who, like the investigator here, is dead-set on getting the ex-con back in prison... even (in both cases) throwing him behind bars for a couple of humiliating days...

That's despite having a good job and a new girlfriend in American turned European starlet Mimsy Farmer, ironically working at a bank and part of the reason that Delone winds up being...

Gérard Depardieu and Victor Lanoux in TWO MEN IN TOWN

Well that shouldn't be spoiled... yet the anti capital-punishment aspect not only takes up the entire third act, it derails two potentially thrilling story-lines: one involving Delone's former partners-in-crime (including potential young firebrand Gérard Depardieu), who keep showing up unannounced, and that tenacious detective (Michel Bouquet), putting the heat on Delon: for having met with those crooks...

Overall, despite great camera angles and fine leading and side performances (including extremely beautiful Ilaria Occhini as Delone's short-lived wife and his feisty red-headed lawyer Malka Ribowska), TWO MEN starts feeling like a collection of cautionary tale vignettes... and all of the intriguing crime-genre aspects become a deliberate means to a tragically predicable end...

Alain Delon and Ilaria Occhini in TWO MEN IN TOWN

Especially once the agenda becomes clear, with Jean Gabin's narration more sermonizing than expository — his character feels more like the director's political mouthpiece than an actual person...

Like Stanley Kubrick's far superior yet equally dismal anti-war classic PATHS OF GLORY, also about France's severe death penalty, if there's no hope for the main characters, there's no real hope for an audience.