le doulos (d. jean-pierre melville)

Quand j'etais petit, my friend Jason gave me a book by Trauffaut about the films of his life, a collection of reviews. A few of the names were known to me, but most were alien. The names the man wrote about seemed to hold an unbearable promise. Becker; Autant-Lara; Kurosowa and more. Many of them are still no more than names, whose films have existed as words on a page, rather than images on a screen. One of the striking and well noted aspects of Trauffaut's collection was the reverence in which US cinema was held. A New Wave loved nothing more than settling back with a big bag of popcorn, a mega cola, and a dirty print of the latest Bogart classic.

Melville's Le Doulos, is very much in this tradition. Everyone walks around in a Bogart mac, with a Bogart fag hanging out of their mouth and a Bogart hat on their head. The film is more Humph than Humphrey himself. People doublecross one another and end up in shoot-outs they shouldn't be at but have to be because, like Bogart, they are party to a cinematic code demanding the character does the right thing, no matter the consequences.

In truth, Belmondo almost out-bogarts Bogart, (High Bogart) and Serge Reggiani, in a fine small-town crook performance, doesn't do a bad job either. (Early Bogart). At its best, such as the mesmerising scene that runs over the titles of a man walking along a fearsome footway, the film has a grimy authenticity. When the jewels are buried, they're really buried, mud under the fingernails. When Belmondo smacks Monique Hennessey in the face, it looks real enough, even if the macho sting is taken out of the act by the final twist.

Bogart and his world feels outdated now. The things he stood for, the manner of his masculinity, that cinematic code he lived and died by so many times. Likewise, Le Doulos is a curiosity piece. Like humour, few things in society change as rapidly as the relationship between police and criminals. What was shocking in one decade is tame in the next. Lastly, the French and the Yanks no longer like one another, french fries have become freedom fries and Macdonalds have been torched. It's hard to imagine a French director making a film that feels like a tribute to Sly Stallone.

The world that Melville captures in all its grittiness has been swept away, initially by the wave that Truffaut and his ilk surfed. Le Doulos was probably hard boiled in its day; now its a competent policier, only we laugh when the good guy cops it at the end. That narrative lost its power when Godard started taking the piss out of it. All that was left for Bogart was immortality and Woody Allen pastiche.