Police Python 357 (1976)
Directed by Alain Corneau, Police Python 357 is a taut French neo-noir starring Yves Montand as a police inspector framed for murder. With moody cinematography and psychological depth, it’s a gripping portrait of suspicion, guilt, and moral decay within the ranks of law enforcement.

Serie Noire (1979)
In Serie Noire, director Alain Corneau adapts Jim Thompson’s novel into a feverish descent into obsession and crime. Patrick Dewaere delivers a tour de force performance as a desperate salesman drawn into a dangerous plot — a raw, unsettling masterpiece of 1970s French noir.

Choice of Arms (1981)
Also directed by Alain Corneau, Choice of Arms (Le Choix des armes) reunites Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu, and Catherine Deneuve in a stylish crime drama about an aging gangster caught between loyalty and survival. Elegantly paced and morally charged, it blends melancholy and menace in classic French crime fashion.

The hardboiled genre of crime fiction evolved from the mystery crime novels of the early 20th century - closely associated with the US pulp magazines, these cynical and unsentimental stories of desperate criminals and social corruption were both influenced by and an influence on the golden era of film noir. 

As their popularity waned in the US, the hardboiled genre remained hugely popular and relevant throughout the 1960s and 70s in France, thanks to the successful Serie Noire imprint and a succession of new translations. In Alain Corneau’s early films, he sought to continue the noir tradition in his native France, and was both directly and indirectly inspired by titans of hardboiled genre, including Kenneth Fearing and Jim Thompson. A heady combination of classic noir and 70s grit, these three darkly thrilling films are vastly underrated and important works in the canon of crime cinema. 

In Police Python 357, Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear) plays a tough cop who, when his lover is found murdered, finds himself implicated in her death and in a battle of wits with a powerful rival, in the second screen adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. 

Série noire adapts Jim Thompson’s A Hell of A Woman to the banlieues of Paris: in an astonishing performance, Patrick Dewaere (Themroc) attempts to save a young girl from prostitution, with murder the only solution.

In Choice of Arms, Yves Montand heads an all-star cast, including Catherine Denueve and Gerard Depardieu, as a former crook pulled out of retirement when a gang on the run turn to him for shelter after a prison break.