Some films radiate a kind of perfection. They delimit their boundaries and ensure that everything within them is honed and chiselled and ticks like a Rolex. Le Samourai is one of those. Its structure is straightforward. Delon’s Jef Costello is a hired assassin who kills someone in the first act. In the second act the police and the gangsters who hired him close in. The third brings the tightly worked denouement, which contains only one potential flaw (how do the police know that Jef is going to show up at the club when he does?). Melville directs with an extreme economy, his washed- out pallet reflecting a desire to sand the film down it its bare essentials. Having said which, the film isn’t averse to taking the risk of shooting on the streets of Paris, with these less controlled moments acting as a counterpoint to the carefully mounted studio scenes. The metro, the cafes, the cars: the film smells of a time and a place, and Delon’s hired killer moves through this world like a ghost.
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