Let Sleeping Cops Lie

1988 French film

14 December 1988 (1988-12-14)

Running time

97 minutesCountryFranceLanguageFrenchBox office$6 million^[1]

Let Sleeping Cops Lie also known as Don't Wake a Sleeping Cop (French: Ne réveillez pas un flic qui dort) is a French crime film released in 1988, directed by José Pinheiro, starring Alain Delon and Michel Serrault. The screenplay is written by Alain Delon and José Pinheiro based on the novel Clause de style by Frédéric H. Fajardie.

The movie tells the story of police inspector Eugéne Grindel (Delon) who investigates the secret illegal ultra-right police organization which mete out justice on a fast track.

Let Sleeping Cops Lie is the last film of a group of popular movies released in the 1980s and starring Alain Delon, which share a visual and narrative style, beginning with Jacques Deray's Three Men to Kill (1980). It was the least successfully commercially.

Alain Delon, also being the film’s producer, dedicated the work to the memory of actor Jean Gabin.^[2]

Plot

Roger Scatti (Serrault) is a conservative police inspector of the old school. He finds intolerable the liberalization of the justice system. More and more people from the underground world slip away from the justice. Finding allies in the police circles, he founded the ultra-right secret illegal organization called "Police devotion". Its purpose is the immediate punishment, usually death, of the notorious criminals, with no trials or whatever inquiries and no bureaucracy. The activities of the organization are particularly brutal, serving for edification to the public. When the punitive operations of the "Police devotion" go out of all bounds, the police chief Cazalières (Gérôme) assign a task to inspector Eugéne Grindel (Delon) to investigate the present circumstances.