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Alphaville 12 rating

Jean-Luc Godard’s venture into sci-fi pits secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) on a mission to destroy the malevolent supercomputer, Alpha 60.

Detective drama 1965 99 mins

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Overview

In Godard's dystopian sci-fi, detective Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) travels to the soulless technopolis of Alphaville on a secret mission to capture the dictatorial Professor Von Braun and destroy the Alpha 60 computer that has outlawed human emotions. Love comes to his aid in the form of Anna Karina’s Natasha von Braun and the poetry of French surrealism.

Appropriating the Lemmy Caution character that had served Constantine well over a series of popular detective films, Godard’s subversion of the character apparently incensed the film’s backers and damaged Constantine’s reputation as a stalwart of the detective genre.