Law Breakers

A man dies in custody. The police report says heart attack. The investigating magistrate who reads the file sees that this is not true and starts looking into how the death happened. What he runs into is witnesses he cannot find, reports that go missing and warnings from his superiors. The further he goes, the plainer it becomes who is being protected. Marcel Carné's film is one of the director's later works. In the lead is the singer Jacques Brel, who plays the magistrate not as a hard man but as a stubborn official. The subject was contested in the France of 1971: violence in custody and the police closing ranks around their own. The film lays the blame not on individual officers but on the arrangement that covers it up.