Word: tellier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NIGHT CALLER is billed as the best psychological thriller since psycho. It is certainly not that, but there are just enough psychological loose ends to prevent the film from succeeding as a straightforward action-crime flick. Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as Inspector Le Tellier, a Gallic Dirty Harry--the unorthodox cop obsessed with getting, and preferably killing...
...Tellier has no personal life that we know about. Without a past or future, he seems to be on duty at all hours of the day and night. He is impatient with the routine background work involved in tracking criminals, thriving mainly on the physical excitement of the chase. And he does chase--the movie contains far too much footage of Belmondo riding on the roofs of subway trains, dangling from helicopters, and hanging by his little finger from the rainpipes of Paris. When he is congratulated by a superior for bringing in a killer, he answers modestly, "It doesn...
This is a perfectly acceptable kind of hero, and Belmondo plays his character straight and tough, but if this is the way we are supposed to see Le Tellier, certain long sequences in the film become irrelevant and distracting. The main plot line involves Le Tellier's search for a maniacal killer who thinks it his duty to punish women of "loose moral." Another, unrelated, killer keeps popping up at odd moments; we learn that he had repeatedly outsmarted Le Tellier in the past and that he had almost cost the cop his job because of uncertainty concerning the death...
...material on killer number two does absolutely nothing to further the real plot of The Night Caller. It would still be useful if it gave us additional insights into the character of Le Tellier, but all it does is emphasize the already established fact that the cop is tough, singleminded and unorthodox. Verneuil pretends to offer psychological amplification, but draws back and gives the same superficial information about his hero. The director does not seem to know what makes Le Tellier tick, or at any rate, he is not sharing his information with...
...director has no sense of priorities in his film, so we view each unrelated event with equal boredom; his distractions and digressions preclude any sense of urgency about the outcome of Le Tellier's search. Verneuil suffers from the same perceptual malady as the killer Minos; the suspense of his thriller disintegrates because he is only capable of focusing on one isolated idea at a time...