Guerrillas Without Ideas

In The Sleeping-Car Murders, Costa-Gavras’s exciting if rather conventional first movie, the hero was a Parisian detective desperately trying to solve a “perfect” murder. With the hindsight provided by three films, we can see that for Costa-Gavras the detective’s desire for truth was not merely a convention required by a popular movie genre; getting at the criminal, violent, hidden reality and bringing it to light is the moral passion animating all of Costa-Ga...