The Loner (Le Solitaire)

Jacques Deray directed the 1987 French crime action film The Loner, released in its original version as Le Solitaire. Jean-Paul Belmondo heads the cast of the roughly 100-minute picture. German cinemas showed it from 14 May 1987 under the title Der Profi 2. With it Belmondo closed the run of commercial action pictures he had been making since 1975's Peur sur la ville (The Night Caller), the films that turned him into a box-office force across continental Europe.

Belmondo plays a police commissioner who sets out to find the man who killed his best friend and colleague, a dangerous crook resurfacing after two years of silence. The cast includes Jean-Pierre Malo, Michel Beaune, Pierre Vernier, Bernard Farcy, Catherine Rouvel and Henri Attal. Deray wrote the script with Alphonse Boudard, Simon Michaël and Daniel Saint-Hamont.

Belmondo's own company, Cerito Films, produced it in association with Alain Sarde's Sara Films. Critics largely panned it, and it was a commercial disappointment, the first Belmondo film in twenty-three years to miss a million admissions in France. He was then triumphing on stage in Sartre's Kean and turned more toward the theatre afterwards, with a brief screen return the next year in Itinéraire d'un enfant gâté. The Loner found a new audience on its first television broadcast in 1990.