The Cinematheque

“This trilogy represents a high-water mark both for Canadian crime cinema and for post-modern international genre revisionism.”

Anthology Film Archives

Long before he scored Canada its first (and so far, only) International Feature Oscar for 2003’s The Barbarian Invasions, Quebecois auteur Denys Arcand earned his stripes as a narrative filmmaker with a trio of unsavoury genre pictures made at the height of the exploitation-cinema boom of the ​’70s. Dubbed the ​“Crime Trilogy,” these three consecutive works—Dirty Money (1972), Réjeanne Padovani (1973), and Gina (1975)—proved the erstwhile NFB documentarian could make good in the arena of downmarket commercial cinema while still preserving the lacerating edge of his sociopolitical commentary. They also betray a masterful grasp of the codes and zeitgeist-reflecting anxieties of classic film noir, each movie a blackened mirror of transgression and moral corruption stemming from a post-October Crisis Quebec.