For a Cop's Hide

For a Cop's Hide (Pour la peau d'un flic, 1981) is a French crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Alain Delon stars and steps behind the camera too — he directed this one himself, working from the bleak vein of French noir fiction.

His character, Choucas, used to carry a police badge; now he scrapes by as a private eye in Paris. A woman hires him to find her missing blind daughter. The job looks routine right up to the moment Choucas realizes it was rigged specifically for him — a trap with his name on it. The deeper he digs, the tighter the noose pulls, and soon every cop in the city is hunting him for two murders he didn't commit. Anne Parillaud appears opposite Delon in one of her early roles.

This is late-period Paris noir from the early '80s: wet streets, cigarette smoke, a lone man nobody believes. As director, Delon shoots himself dry and unglamorous, all hard angles — a cold procedural for fans of vintage European crime cinema. Stream For a Cop's Hide (1981) online on iFILM.