I have not watched this feature since thirty years and I absolutely wanted to see it again. I was not disappointed, although the eighties at their worst - or may I say at their best - was rather annoying to me. Because if you watch closely any french movie - for large screen or TV - you have always the same feeling in the atmosphere, acting, editing, way to handle the camera, in the production design. Every thing. I even find it in the novels written in this time. Awful. This one makes no exception. I only enjoyed the topic, typical from a screen writer like the late Jean-Patrick Manchette - the author of Nada and many other novels or screenplays for the big screen. I loved this scheme of legalized vigilante groups of law abiding citizens deciding to take in charge the application of justice. THEIR justice. And besides, because in this film you actually have TWO lines, you also have the scheme of the illegal, secret, special forces of police, the one in which the common citizen has not heard of. It actually occurred in France during the sixties and seventies before stopping in the early days of 1980 with the Auriol slaughter, in which a whole family was killed. That made an end of this organization: S.A.C: Service d'Action Civique, created in the early sixties by Charles De Gaulle to fight against O.A.S, just after war in Algeria. Well, back to this film, I was delighted to find Michel Aumont as the rotten head police officer, the "superintendant". I thought as the same character he had in NADA, originally written by Manchette and directed by Claude Chabrol, in which he played the terrific "superintendant" Goémont. His best performance ever. An evil character as I crave for.
Review of Légitime violence
