The Old Gun

Set in France in 1944, The Old Gun centres on Julien Dandieu, a surgeon at a hospital in Montauban who quietly treats Resistance fighters. As German forces close in, he arranges for his wife Clara and their daughter Florence to stay at the family's old castle in a country village, believing they will be safer away from the fighting. When he travels to join them, he finds that German troops have already occupied the area and carried out reprisals against the villagers, and that his wife and daughter are among the victims. Grief-stricken, Julien takes up an old hunting rifle and turns the castle he knows so well against the soldiers still present there. The film was directed by Robert Enrico, who also wrote the screenplay with Claude Veillot and Pascal Jardin. It followed his 1967 film The Last Adventure and preceded The French Revolution, which came in 1989. Philippe Noiret plays Julien, with Romy Schneider as Clara, Jean Bouise as his friend François, and Joachim Hansen, Robert Hoffmann and Karl Michael Vogler among the German officers. A German-French production running 103 minutes, it has drawn a 7.5 rating on IMDb from around 5,800 votes and the same score on TMDB from roughly 299 votes, indicating a solid and fairly consistent response from viewers across both platforms.