le samouraï (w&d jean-pierre melville, w. joan mcleod, georges pellegrin)

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. 

le cercle rouge (w&d jean-pierre melville)

So, whilst we watch Godard and even Truffaut send up or deconstruct genre, it’s easy to forget how, then, as now, genre was something the French cineastes adored. Perhaps it’s not so ridiculous to think of Barthes’ structuralism in this context. There is a fascination in French culture with the way in which something is assembled. Genre is all about variations on a theme. The theme is well known, by both the audience and the filmmakers. What is interesting is not so much the narrative as the mechanics of the story. The way the pistons move, the way that one element impacts on another. Le Cercle Rouge is a great example of this. It’s a straightforward heist movie. Delon, Montand and Volontè are three suave crooks who plan and execute a robbery, each one acting for different reasons. The film luxuriates in the fact that it doesn’t have to offer any surprises. The fundamental tension of the heist movie does all the leverage that the narrative requires to engage the audience. Will they pull it off or not? The film runs at 140 minutes, but Melville was clearly confident that this tension at the heart of the mechanics of the narrative was enough to engage the viewer, allowing him to explore a neo-existential vision of characters who are willing to put themselves under inordinate pressure and confront probable doom, because life only has value when it is put in jeopardy. Which is a journey we, as the audience, sitting back comfortably, share. The whole film is endowed with a poker-faced seriousness. The experience of watching it has more in common with watching a game of chess than a wrestling match. It is precisely because we as an audience understand the genre rules, that this game of chess feels weirdly engrossing, even fifty years on. 

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An aside here is perhaps to comment on how little cinema, for all its supposed technological gains, (HD/ 3D/ dolby/ digital compositing etc) has evolved over fifty years. The shifting experience of watching a film from 1920 in 1970 would reflect a truly radical transformation, (sound/ colour/ special effects/ acting etc). Whereas a film from 1970, viewed in 2021 can feel almost contemporary. 

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.