Released to Blu-ray on the Radiance label this week comes The Professional (Le Professionnel), a 1981 action thriller starring French cinema legend, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Once the darling of the French New Wave in films such as A bout de souffle, Pierrot le Fou and Une femme est une femme for Godard, by the 1970s the star had moved towards more commercial fare, enjoying the kind of late stage action hero status that his contemporary Charles Bronson was also enjoying or, for a more current example, Liam Neeson. Belmondo was unrepentant about this move, explaining in a 1990 interview; “What intellectuals don’t like is success. Success in France is always looked down upon, not by the public, but by intellectuals. If I’m nude in a film, that’s fine for the intellectuals. But if I jump from a helicopter, they think it’s terrible”. The Professional is a helicopter movie, and one that was very successful indeed, becoming the fourth most watched film in France in 1981, behind La Chevre, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Fox and the Hound.
Based on the novel Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal by British author Patrick Alexander, The Professional sees Belmondo play French Secret Service agent Josselin “Joss” Beaumont. At the start of the film, Beaumont is on trial for the attempted assassination of Colonel N’ Jala (Pierre Saintons), the President for life for the fictitious African country and former French colony, Malagawi. It transpires that he was sent their on the orders of his spymasters but, at some point during his arrival in the country, the political situation had changed. It was therefore no longer in France’s interests to assassinate N’ Jala and, rather than recall their agent from active service, they elected to take instruction from government and renounce Beaumont to his captors. Drugged into giving a confession at trial, Beaumont’s future looks bleak as a lengthy sentence of hard labour awaits. But Beaumont is a determined and capable operator and, biding his time, enduring two years of slavery, abuse and torture, he makes a successful escape bid and returns to Paris with one intention – revenge.
The French Secret Service and government are appalled that this bad penny has turned up and even further horrified to learn that his return coincides with a diplomatic trip to France for N’ Jala. Reasoning that Beaumont intends to complete his original mission, they hurriedly assemble a team who will do anything to stop this rogue agent, led by the ruthless police commissioner, Rosen (Robert Hossein). With Beaumont having both a wife (Elisabeth Margoni) and mistress (Cyrielle Clair) in the French capital, the authorities feel confident that they have his hideouts covered, but the resourceful Beaumont makes a habit of running rings around them until all roads lead to the Château de Ferrières where N’ Jala is in residence and a bloody showdown seems inevitable.
There’s a particularly thrilling and destructive car chase along the Trocadéro, choreographed by the legendary Rémy Julienne, the man behind the legendary automotive stunts in The Italian Job and several James Bond movies, but that’s the film’s main action spectacle.
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Directed by Georges Lautner, The Professional is a solidly made thriller with all the beats that one would expect from a film about an abandoned spy out for revenge, plus a few curveballs thrown into the mix too. For example, I never expected to see a sequence in which Beaumont’s wife Jeanne is threatened with sexual assault from a lesbian police officer if she doesn’t tell her husband’s pursuers all she knows about his whereabouts! Being the 1980s too, the women characters are given short shrift; glorified trophies to be wheeled out in frequent stages of undress and are often threatened or assaulted. Equally, despite Belmondo’s later comments about intellectualism versus commercialism, it does at times seem as if Lautner wants to do something more intelligent than your average thriller. The Professional strives to say something about the Francafrique situation and the complex diplomacy that occurred between France and her former colonies in Africa, but the politics haven’t aged very well at all and this is apparent in even the film’s most blink and you’ll miss it moments, such as a white stunt driver in Belmondo’s escape from Malagawi being “blacked up”.
Perhaps the intentions for something more sophisticated are best evinced in the decision to liberally use Ennio Morricone’s Chi Mai throughout the movie. The composition had originally began life in the score for The Great Silence in 1968, before the melody was extensively reworked by the composer to become the famous tune we are now all familiar with. It made its debut in 1971’s Maddalena, before being used for the 1978 BBC TV series An Englishman’s Castle. In the year that The Professional was released, the track was enjoying success in the UK, reaching number two in the charts, thanks to it being used as the theme music for The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, yet another BBC series. Despite it becoming synonymous with Belmondo (was used as the melody for the last tribute to the star in the post mortem national ceremony held on 9 September 2021, three days after his death) it seems an odd fit here amongst the commercial action and I think it was far better suited to something epic like Lloyd George.
In terms of action, The Professional has its fair share, but anyone expecting to see some of those stunt setpieces performed by Belmondo himself, like a proto-Tom Cruise, may be disappointed. There’s a particularly thrilling and destructive car chase along the Trocadéro, choreographed by the legendary Rémy Julienne, the man behind the legendary automotive stunts in The Italian Job and several James Bond movies, but that’s the film’s main action spectacle. The rest of the thrills are provided by the confident and capable Belmondo doling out slaps to anyone who steps in his path, most notably Inspector Fargas (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), Rosen’s cocky young sidekick. Whilst it’s fun to see the weary and relaxed Belmondo lure his pursuers into his steel-like trap, springing to life with brutal physicality before returning to his natural winning composure, I couldn’t help but long for a few more scenes of him handing people their arses. Though there’s more than a whiff of Bond and The Equalizer to Beaumont, The Professional is a little bloodless for a revenge thriller, with Beaumont even just stopping by to discuss the situation in the most civil terms with Michael Beaune’s sympathetic Valeras, the figure tasked with co-ordinating the mission against him. Nevertheless, the rivalry between Belmondo and Hossein as Rosen is palpable and you’re spurring them on for their inevitable showdown, which occurs some distance before the film’s fashionably downbeat ending.
Special features on this Radiance release includes the usual trailer, new interviews with critic and author Ginette Vincendeau about Belmondo and film score expert Lovely Jon on Morricone and Chi Mai, plus archival interviews with Belmondo himself and his agent/producer Rene Chateau. An audio commentary from film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson rounds off the extras, whilst the film has itself been given a HD digital transfer and new improved English subtitles.
THE PROFESSIONAL IS OUT NOW ON RADIANCE FILMS BLU-RAY
