DVR Diary: L'AINE DES FERCHAUX (1963)

Also known as "Doom Magnet" and "An Honorable Young Man," Jean-Pierre Melville's first color film is widely regarded as the weakest film of his great 1960s run, and that looks like a fair assessment. Something's off right from the start. Star Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a mediocre boxer entering the ring for a make-or-break fight. The crowd is entirely unresponsive as the fighters are introduced and while they fight during the opening credits. After Michel, Belmondo's character, loses on points, part of the crowd comes to life to heckle him as he leaves the arena. Perhaps we've learned something about Michel; to lose the way he did in an uneventful bout suggests that he lacks heart. He definitely lacks something. After two weeks he's reduced to abandoning his apartment to avoid paying rent and selling his and his girlfriend Lina's spare clothes, and the only reason he doesn't sell her heirloom necklace, regardless of what he tells her later, is that the thing is actually worthless. To be fair, Michel is looking for work and manages to land a promising gig as a "secretary" to Dieudonne Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), a banker who's fleeing France to avoid prosecution for murdering some Africans back in colonial days. The only catch is that Michel has to leave with Ferchaux immediately. That means sneaking out on Lina (Malvina Silberberg) as she sits at an outdoor cafe table without a sou to her name. Our protagonist has been established as just about as unlikable as possible.

Ferchaux is bound for the U.S., where he has funds stashed in a safe-deposit box. He can't get the bulk of his money out of his American bank accounts because of the extradition threat, however, and to keep one step ahead he heads south with Michel, toward the ultimate goal of Venezuela and another safe-deposit box. The second half of the film takes place around New Orleans and includes a nice little travelogue of the city's red-light district. Michel grows increasingly weary of Ferchaux as the older man, less lordly on the run, grows more emotionally needy -- almost like a girlfriend. He thinks of taking the money and running, but a group of unsavory locals led by Jeff (American character actor Todd Martin), a French-speaking veteran who runs a diner, is getting the same idea.  By now Michel has an American girlfriend (Michele Mercier), which gives him extra motivation to grab the money. But once he does so, he has second thoughts that reach back a great distance. He reminds himself of what he did to Lina back home, and that seems to inspire him to return the money. When he goes back to Ferchaux's lair, he finds the old man fighting with Todd and his crew. Michel comes to the rescue, but Ferchaux is already mortally wounded. As a final act of generosity, the dying man offers Michel the key to the safe-deposit box in Caracas. "You and your money can go to hell," Michel answers as the film fades out. You get the impression that he did the right thing at the end not so much out of loyalty to Ferchaux but to make virtual amends to Lina, if not simply to do the right thing for once. While Melville based this film on a novel by Georges Simenon, France's 20th-century master of mystery and crime fiction, it comes across as an inflated anecdote, padded with second-unit American footage. Melville's protagonists are rarely good guys, but they often have some quality that earns some sympathy from the audience, but Michel is too much of a selfish mediocrity for most of the film to be worth caring about, while Vanel's Ferchaux is a monster who turns into a wretch. I get the impression that we were supposed to appreciate the color and the atmosphere more than anything else while waiting for Michel's moral awakening, but that wasn't enough. This wasn't a terrible film, only unengaging beyond its value as a travelogue for parts of 1960s America. Fortunately, Melville's best work was still ahead of him.

TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (Deux Hommes dans..., 1959)

You never know who you'll meet in the big city.

Why, it's Jean-Pierre Melville, the French master of crime and suspense, the direcor of Le Samourai and Army of Shadows. Don't let his sleepy demeanor deceive you; he's a busy man today. Melville isn't just writing and directing this picture, but he's acting as well -- in fact, though he doesn't take top billing, Monsieur Modest is the main character of the story. And he shares a cinematography credit with Nicolas Heyer. He's in New York to shoot exteriors (and the interior of a subway train) and establish atmosphere; he'll shoot the other interiors back home in France. They don't really match that well, but Melville's Manhattan is less a physical place than a territory of mood and music. His opening credits play over Times Square to establish his bona fides, but his camera sets the tone by pulling inexorably away from the familiar crossroads of the world toward darker, more nondescript places. The music still says Manhattan, however, if not America, or 1959. Some of it sounds like library music but much of it is jazzily evocative the way Melville intended. This French film could be the soundtrack for a certain strata of America at the end of the Fifties, where rock 'n roll hasn't reached yet, where the tone of the vibraphone is the church bell of sophistication ringing through the midnight fog cigarette smoke across a sea of booze. They call this film an homage to film noir but it's more of a homage to its own time than to the decade past. It's a Fifties, not a Forties film, in spirit as well as fact.

It might remind you of a Thirties film, since Melville's hero is a reporter hunting a story. He writes for Agence France-Presse and his job is to track down a French diplomat who didn't show up that afternoon at the U.N. Melville acknowledges New York as the capital of the world through his attention to the U.N., portraying its headquarters as an eerie monolith perched like an upright domino begging to be toppled into the river. His quest takes him from this heart of the world into the Manhattan demimonde, descending from a Broadway theater -- the Mercury Theater, mind you, since there's something Wellsian, evocative not only of Kane but Arkadin, to the story -- to a Capitol Records studio to a burlesque club, tracking down women known to be lovers of the diplomat. But the path of the hard-boiled newshound is also the path of Sidney Falco, and Melville's sidekick, the photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset) is a man on the make, looking for his opportunity to get a scoop, or to catch an entertainer topless when she isn't looking.

It may not have been too soon for Melville to be influenced by Sweet Smell of Success, and in any event Burt Lancaster is spiritually present in Times Square -- his picture Separate Tables is playing in one of the long-gone movie palaces while the credits roll. While Melville hints at characteristic suspense by having himself and Grasset tailed by a mysterious car, the story eventually resolves itself into a moral dilemma. Reporter and photographer find the diplomat dead in an actress's apartment, tipped off by news of her intermission suicide attempt at the Mercury. For Delmas it's the opportunity of a lifetime that only grows bigger when it turns out that AFP intends to cover up the sordid circumstances of the diplomat's demise. The truth grows only more lucrative if it catches someone in a lie. The funny part of it is that Delmas is willing to lie in a similar way. Melville's boss has him move the body from the apartment to a car, but Delmas had earlier moved it from the couch where they found him to the more provocatively photogenic bed. The news agency and the government have their reasons for the cover-up, among them being the deceased's reputation as a hero of the Resistance, but Delmas's resistance to their scheme is no blow for Freedom or Truth but a hunt for the Buck or the Franc. Melville's character goes along with the cover-up with no real enthusiasm. but when it becomes clear to him that Delmas is willing to disgrace the diplomat's innocent family to get his scoop, then there has to be a showdown ... or does there?

The new DVD of the film -- its American debut on home video -- sports a Tarantino blurb equating Melville with Sergio Leone, and maybe for that reason I caught a faint hint of Pulp Fiction in the way a fixer tells our protagonists how to deal with a dead body while telling a tale of wartime heroism. I wouldn't make too much of that, though I suppose the atmosphere of homage makes Deux Hommes Melville's most Tarantinian film. It may not seem very Melvillian to those used to his suspense classics of the Sixties; there's a more overt sense of fun, of Melville living out a fantasy of his own, than you'll get in his masterpieces. His enthusiasm overrides most of the awkwardness that comes inevitably from the mismatch of interiors and exteriors and the casting of Francophones as stilted-sounding Americans. Acknowledge the film as homage instead of mimesis and most objections to its awkward moments will fade away. It's a labor of love more than anything else, and I kinda like it that way.

LEON MORIN, PRIEST (1961)

The Criterion Collection has done me a favor by releasing their latest acquisition from the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville during Barnes & Noble's semi-annual half-price sale on the elite line of DVDs. The film is going to be available as a Netflix stream, but a Criterion Melville is virtually a must-own for me. This latest release does not disappoint despite being quite different in content and tone from what I've seen previously from the French master of crime and suspense. Leon Morin adapts a prize-winning novel by Beatrix Beck set during the Axis occupation of France during the late war. Melville had been there already and would go there again, but on this occasion his subject is not the French Resistance, but the impact of war and a male depopulation on the women of a small town in the southern part of the country, where the Italians were actually first to arrive.

Our protagonist is Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), who corrects papers for a correspondence school that relocated its headquarters for the duration. Her husband is gone and she's sent her daughter to be taken care of in the country. With most of the young men gone and with the Italians more an object of curiosity than anything else, the atmosphere isn't exactly oppressive at first. In fact, it seems fraught with transgressive potential to the Barny, who struggles with an unanticipated infatuation with her supervisor Sabine, whom she describes as an amazon and a samurai (!!!). She wants her friends to know that she's attracted to Sabine to the extent that the tall, composed woman resembles a handsome young man -- and this caveat seems sincere, considering that she soon becomes infatuated with one of the few remaining handsome young men in town, our title character (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

The odd thing is, Barny is a self-professed Communist, and she makes contact with Leon Morin initially with the purpose of teasing a priest in his confession booth with the Marxism, "Religion is the opiate of the people." Our would be she-troll is surprised, however, when Morin proves a nimble-witted debater who doesn't take offense at cheap shots. He's soon inviting her to his quarters to borrow theology books so they can continue their debates at a more informed level. A kind of merry war goes on as the Germans arrive and the Resistance intensifies until Barny seems poised to capitulate, whether on the strength of Morin's polemics or on the strength of his good looks. For one reason or another, the spiritual-counselor business is booming for the young priest, and after a while, and especially as Barny edges toward conversion, Morin seems to grow increasingly uncomfortable with it. He grows more brusque with her as the fight goes out of her, but she sees his edgy behavior as sexual tension. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but he gets literally jumpy at any hint of romance, and his postwar transfer to an interior mission in the countryside is clearly a relief. And as you may have guessed, the war ends and the occupiers leave.

I'd call what Barny and Morin share a doomed relationship if I felt more certain that it was a relationship in any real sense. They may seem like the ultimate mismatched partners superficially, but they're really closer to two of a kind. The potentiality and liminality Barny experiences during the Occupation seems to be Morin's normal state. The war shakes Barny loose from complacency, but complacency seems utterly alien to Morin. That may be strange to say of a priest, but look at the evidence. He expresses frustration with the church hierarchy on many subjects and is most interested in Barny when she's most willing to contest his views. When she succumbs to his arguments, he almost seems to grow contemptuous toward her. The tension Barny perceives is as much Morin's disappointment in losing a worthy opponent as it is any anxiety about Barny's feelings toward him. For all his apologias for religion, Morin comes across as an alienated intellectual whose faith and vocation only enable his alienation rather than transcending it. For all Barny's alleged Communism, she's really after stability and security, while Morin seems happiest in an environment of struggle and argument -- an eternal debating society. The upheaval of Occupation gives him a moment to shine, but it only seems right that he hits the road when it's all over.

Father Morin prefers resisting temptation to resisting occupation for some reason.

Leon Morin, Pretre certainly has a different atmosphere from any Melville film I've seen to date. This tale of the Occupation has a perversely idyllic feel. Barny's community is a place where the girls gush over the Italians and their feathered hats, and where Barny's little girl France (where else can a child be named after her country?) befriends a gentle German soldier. Melville makes a point of never showing the Resistance in action, though they're often heard offscreen. We hardly see the bad guys do more than parade or drill; a German hassles Barny at a checkpoint once, but lets her go with little fuss. In fact, her greatest peril comes after the Americans liberate the town; a G.I. is persuaded only with great effort by his buddy not to rape our heroine. We're dealing with people out of the loop of history, who aren't part of the heroic national narrative of Resistance but aren't collaborators either -- for the most part. Life goes on, but not quite, and disruptions like Barny's successive crushes result.

Melville gives the film an erotic charge not just during Barny's dreams of Morin, but in Barny's workplace, where Sabine (Nicole Morel) appears to at least partially reciprocate Barny's crush. Sabine isn't the only amazon on the job; Barny also has to deal with the belligerent anti-semite Christine (Irene Tunc) in the nearest thing the film has to a fight scene.

Sexual harrassment or just plain harrassment? The office is Barny's battlefield in this war.

For his part, Morin has to fend off the formidable Marion (Monique Bertho), who's reputed to have five lovers and seems to be out for a sixth. Jean-Paul Belmondo, then red-hot off of Breathless, seems like ideal casting for Morin -- I know I can't imagine Alain Delon as a priest for a second. Belmondo isn't classically handsome by any stretch but has a sensual charisma that makes the women's craze for him plausible, as well as a certain narcissic smugness that limits his potential for real emotional intimacy with anyone. Against him Melville pits the star of Hiroshima Mon Amour in an early clash of New Wave titans, and Riva holds her own pretty well. It's her movie despite the title and the billing, and she never lets it slip from her hands.

Leon Morin is proof that Melville wasn't a creature of genre but had visual and narrative gifts to bring to any story material. He makes Barny's flirtation with Morin nearly as intriguing as any of his capers or chases in his classic crime stories. I'm not ready to rank this one above his later crime epics -- except perhaps for Un Flic -- but Morin is still an impressive achievement, and one that has me impatient for Criterion to haul in the rest of the Melvilles I haven't seen. How about this time next year?

For now, how about a trailer? This one, with English subtitles, was uploaded to YouTube by ClassicMovieTrailers.

LE SAMOURAI (1967)

The title of Jean-Pierre Melville's thriller may deceive some first-time viewers. Our image of a samurai is likely to be more swaggering, more superpowered, more badass than Melville's title character, Jef Costello. I actually had an irreverent thought when I saw Costello (Alain Delon) stalk into Martey's nightclub in his hat and raincoat, with his hands in his pocket and a stony demeanor on his face. I was strangely reminded of Wilmer Cook, the hapless gunsel played by Dwight Frye and Elisha Cook Jr. in different versions of The Maltese Falcon. That's about the diametric opposite of a modern-day samurai, but the swagger, the badassness, weren't what Melville had in mind. His epigraph to the film defines the samurai as the ultimate solitary man. Allegedly quoting from "Bushido: The Book of the Samurai," he says that the samurai's solitude can be compared only to that of a tiger in the jungle...maybe.

Jef Costello is no loner -- he has a girlfriend and a group of poker buddies (at least for alibi purposes) -- but he lives alone, except for a songbird, in spartan simplicity. And as it turns out, there's a limit to how much anyone can help him in his predicament as it develops. It's no big revelation that Jef is a hitman; probably everyone who watches this film from its Paris premiere to a DVD arriving in the mail today knows that going in. The first act of the film shows him at work. It is quiet work, involving him stealing a car with help from his hefty ring of keys and getting its plates changed. Exactly ten minutes pass before a line of dialogue is spoken, when he visits his girlfriend. He stops at the card game, promising to come back later. Then he goes to Martey's, where he kills Martey, outgunning him in an unexpected shootout. He leaves, but encounters the house pianist in the hallway. He is seen in part by other employees. This is sloppy work; he is no samurai in any sense of mastery or elegance of execution. He is no super criminal; Melville's criminal protagonists never are.

The minimal description of a man in a hat and raincoat is enough to get Jef caught in a dragnet along with dozens of the usual suspects. A few at a time they are lined up on stage for the Martey's staff to examine. One man is positive that Jef is the killer, but the pianist, who has looked at him point blank, will not confirm his identity. The flics aren't satisfied; they consider Jef a principal suspect, but they can't get more than the one old man to i.d. him. Throughout the scene, Melville maintains a deliberate, almost documentary pace when other filmmakers might rush through this business to establish the main point: the pianist's refusal to identify Jef. In this way he sustains an atmosphere of authenticity; the scene seems to play out in real-time, or something closer to it than we're accustomed to in thrillers, despite all the editing going on. The editing is an invisible balancing act that keeps the scene going to build our anticipation of something happening without making us impatient with the film. Dispensing with most of the usual gimmicks for dramatizing the situation, Melville still induces a sensation that something important can happen at any moment.

You'd think anyone would recognize Alain Delon, even with his hat on, but Caty Rosier (below) wants the law to believe she doesn't.

Jef is sprung, but tailed. He shakes the tail (which will only grow in scope) to rendezvous on a bridge with a contact who will pay him for the hit on Martey. But his employers are dissatisfied with his sloppiness in leaving witnesses and Jef finds himself in a fight for his life. Melville heightens the suspense of the moment by obscuring it: we see the abrupt fight through the screen of the bridge itself, in a tracking shot. Jef escapes wounded. We see him treat the flesh wound in his grungy kitchen. Melville films the therapy with the same realist deliberation as the other sequences, patiently observing all the steps.

While the police intensify their surveillance, and their pressure on his girlfriend (who stands by her man), Jef decides to track down the employer who betrayed him. Melville's deliberation really pays off in a sequence in which Jef never acknowledges but struggles stoically to shake a hydra-like tail of male and female flics on the metro as headquarters track his movements on an electronic map. He finally manages to confront his criminal persecutors, who make him an offer to redeem himself: kill the pianist and everyone's problems are just about solved. But that he cannot do. He owes her a debt (and it's no accident storywise that she wears a robe with an oriental motif at home) even as he realizes that she most likely protected him because she was ordered to. This is one aspect of the samurai archetype in which Jef ultimately matches our expectations: he has a sense of honor and is willing to sacrifice his own life to uphold it. One moment of awful simplicity tells us what's going to happen. Jef returns to Martey's and leaves his hat with the hat-check girl. She gives him a hat-check, and he leaves it at the counter....

Jef Costello sees a lot in Le Samourai. Some he may like; some probably not.

For a long time, before Army of Shadows made its belated arrival on American shores in 2005, Le Samourai was considered the definitive Melville film. I wonder whether that's the reason I'd waited so long before looking at it. It ends up being the seventh Melville that I've seen. Could it live up to the epic expectations? As a matter of fact, it could. It is a masterpiece of the thriller genre, or at least of a certain kind of thriller. There are at least two kinds: the race against time, and the kind Melville specialized in, in which suspense is the feeling that anything can happen and it'll probably be bad. That's the suspense you feel in North by Northwest when Cary Grant stands on the roadside waiting to meet someone before the crop duster shows up, except that Melville can keep that mood going for an entire film.

All thrillers are manipulative in some way, since they must focus your attention on important details, but Melville does his manipulation subtly, not blatantly, mostly through editing rather than through the sensationalist gimmickry common today. There's no moment when Delon suddenly starts walking in slow motion to telegraph that something big is going to happen. There's nothing wrong with a director doing that if it's done right, but that sort of thing is overdone now to the point of devaluation, which makes Melville's style a huge gust of fresh air. It's a style that respects intelligence and trusts the viewer to figure out what's going on, since it's all presented quite clearly.

I like the way Melville can invest modest or petty crime with a tragic gravitas. Jef Costello is something different from the typical Melvillian gangster, but he's clearly from the same milieu. He is no super-hitman and is all too fallible, but he's also indisputably formidable, a man you mess with at your peril and not anyone who can be brought down easily. The nearest thing to too-good-to-be-true is Jef's ability to orchestrate things in order to die on his own terms, but even then it doesn't look like he exactly enjoys going out the way he does. Melville's crime fantasies are ingenious in the way they convince you that they aren't taking place in a fantasy world, and as Jef Alain Delon embodies the balance between ordinariness and pure pulp power. If he wasn't already an international star with both art and action credentials he would have been once this film appeared. Melville would use him well again in Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic, in sharply contrasting roles, and he vies with Lino Ventura as the director's ideal leading man.

Le Samourai is a high point of French cinematic cool, a manner averse to melodramatics though not to earned emotion. In contrast to Hollywood hyperbole or variations on that style from Tokyo to Bollywood, the French manner might seem cold or distant, but it often rewards the attentiveness it requires with a rich sense of human experience or social observation. Melville's films make a good gateway to French cinema for the otherwise uninitiated because there are well-staged shootings and other action along the way. Samourai itself is a great gateway to the rest of Melville's work.

The trailer was uploaded by Annie7676

LE DOULOS (1962)

In an interview for the Criterion Collection, Bertrand Tavernier, who was an assistant director for this film, recounts that his then-boss Jean-Pierre Melville was castigated by Nouvelle Vague mandarin Jacques Rivette, among others, for the supposedly misguided notion of making tragedies set in the criminal underworld. Rivette's complaint was that tragedy can't take place in a realm without honor. He seems to have a very strict or restricted notion of honor. If anything, the lack of a rule of law in the underworld requires people to form bonds of trust and faith that at least bear a resemblance to a code of honor. Arguably, the tragedy of the underworld is that many criminals need to believe in such a code even as they stand prepared to betray anyone for personal advantage or sheer survival. It's one reason why betrayal is punished so severely, and why the perception of betrayal is so dangerous.

With that in mind, Le Doulos may be the most tragic of Melville's crime films. The Frenchman is one of my ten favorite directors on the strength of his later films: Le Duexieme Souffle, Army of Shadows, Le Circle Rouge, and Un Flic (Dirty Money). I own a DVD of Le Samourai but haven't watched it yet, opting instead for this earlier yet just as characteristic effort. The tragedy of Le Doulos is almost classical: a man believes a friend has betrayed him and makes plans for revenge, only to discover too late that he was mistaken.

Jean-Paul Belmondo is the star of the film, but the main character is played by Serge Reggiani. He's Maurice Faugel, a criminal who we first encounter visiting and suddenly killing a man and stealing his jewels. He goes a discreet distance from the victim's house, finds a streetlamp for a landmark, and buries the loot and a gun by the base.

Le Doulos was seen as a comeback film for Serge Reggiani, who had some hits in the 1950s but then seemed to drop out of cinema for a while. He later became better known as a singer, though he made cameos in later Melville films.

We next see Maurice in his apartment receiving some burglary gear from Belmondo, who plays Silien, Maurice's close friend who's on the verge of getting out of the business. Maurice has a girlfriend, Therese (played by Melville's secretary, Monique Hennessy) who doesn't like Silien for starters and will have less cause to do so later.

Leaving chez Maurice, Silien places a call to the cops. After Maurice and his partner in the upcoming robbery depart for the job, Silien returns to the apartment to make small talk with Therese and punch her in the face. The Europeans take such matters to greater extremes than the Americans, so we see Silien truss her up pretty good and tie her by the neck to a radiator. He gags her, then revives her by pouring booze on her head and demands to know where Maurice was going. She spills. We next see Maurice's job interrupted by a police detective. He kills the cop, but his partner dies as well.

Monique Hennessy as Therese, before (above) and after (below) in Le Doulos.

People have warned Maurice that Silien is not to be trusted, that he has too cozy a relation with the police, but he refused to listen. They called Silien Le Doulos, the (guy with the) hat, the gang slang for a stoolie. Now Maurice second-guesses his pal, but before he knows it he's nabbed for the earlier crime. This time Silien springs into action with an elaborate scheme to spring his friend by framing some other gangsters for the original crime. This middle section is where Belmondo dominates the film as we discover his grudge against the man he's going to frame: it's about a woman, and does that surprise you? Without giving away the details, I can tell you that his plan works and Maurice is released. When they meet again, Silien has a revelation: the person who ratted him out on the second robbery was Therese. He went after her to find the robbery location so he could help Maurice, but was too late. By the way, he went back to the apartment later with an accomplice, grabbed Therese, put her in a car and sent it off a cliff. Oh, and his calling the cops? Well, he already knew that Maurice was going to rob a place that night, so he was calling his buddy the detective to set up a dinner date and keep him tied up (figuratively, not Therese-style) to protect Maurice.

Belmondo applies the charm to a smoky Fabienne Dali as his old flame. She will later appear in Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill!

Are you supposed to believe all this? Melville presents it in flashback form, giving it the authenticity of something you can see rather than simply something Belmondo says, inviting you to believe it. In any event, Maurice believes it, perhaps as much because he wants to believe his friend as because of any plausibility to the story. So Silien heads off to his new home to plan his future, and Maurice gets a phone call from a man named Kern who tells him that he's got the wreath Maurice had asked for and will make the delivery as arranged.

This would be the part in a Warner Bros. cartoon when Maurice's head is temporarily replaced by that of a jackass, or by the image of a shoe heel. This Kern is someone he met in jail, when he was convinced that Silien had betrayed him. At the time, almost frivolously, he suggested to Kern that he'd pay well if someone would, er, deliver a large wreath to Silien's house. Now he realizes, or believes, that Silien is guiltless, or at least as guiltless as a career criminal gets, and that Kern is free and about to kill the guy. There's nothing to do but get in a car and drive like a devil and hope to catch Silien before he walks into a death trap. This sets up a supposedly Psycho-inspired drive down a rainy highway as doomy Bernard Hermann-style music by the excellent Paul Misraki looms on the sidetrack. Shall we ratchet up the tension a little more? Very well: Maurice is in such a hurry that he doesn't realize that he's passed Silien, who has pulled into a gas station to fill his tank. So instead of saving his friend from the death trap, he's going to walk into it himself....

First Reggiani, then Belmondo make their way toward doom at the close of Le Doulos.

Le Doulos is vintage Melville, with luminously noirish cinematography by Nicholas Heyer and more fluid camera movement than I'm used to from the director. That attitude of cool fatalism pervades the film, paying off in a finish that might be tragically ironic, if you believed Silien's story, or tragically appropriate, if you didn't, or tragically inevitable, if you recall that these are criminals with the odds always against them. The finale is very nicely done, as Melville builds suspense through repetition. We first see Maurice racing frantically down a rainy road to Silien's house. A few minutes later, we see Silien strolling blithely down the same path towards where we know trouble awaits. It's a great Melville moment from another great film. It cements his standing on my director list, and there's still more to see. That's good to know.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by Felixxx999.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

In a 2002 interview for the Criterion Collection DVD release of Jean-Pierre Melville's career-defining caper film, actor Daniel Cauchy relates that Melville made an unusual request when the time came to film a climactic gunfight. The director asked Cauchy to throw himself backward when he was supposed to be hit. Cauchy had never heard of such a thing. Actors pretending to be shot, he explains, always clutched their stomachs and crumpled to the ground. But Melville insisted that people hit by bullets were actually thrown backwards. To this day, he told the interviewer, Cauchy had no idea where Melville got the idea, though he suspected that the director must have heard of this phenomenon from an army veteran. But Cauchy has just spent time telling us how obsessed Melville was with American movies, how comprehensively knowledgeable about them he was. We're talking about a movie filmed over a two-year period before a 1956 release. So I was practically yelling at the screen, "SHANE, fool!"

Cauchy compromised with Melville, agreeing to throw himself backwards if Melville would also shoot a take in which he clutched his stomach and fell down the traditional way. The director ended up using the traditional take. Hearing this story helped clarify my opinion of Bob le Flambeur, because it was proof of a kind that we weren't yet getting the full Melville. Maybe it's because Melville hadn't yet gone widescreen. Maybe it's that the music seems more omnipresent and insistent than in his later films. And maybe it's what struck me as a more sentimental attitude than I'd come to associate with Melville. I liked the movie, but coming to it from experience with the director's later work, I thought it lacked something characteristic.

"Bob le flambeur," what we'd call "Bob the high roller," is Robert Montagne (Roger Duchesne), an old school gangster whose hobby is gambling. He keeps a slot machine in his closet, but has never hit the jackpot. He isn't good at gambling, but he must have been good at something, since he's clearly a man of respect in the Rue de Pigalle and the Montmarte neighborhood. Despite his losses, he's also clearly a man of resources. He's the man whom Marc, a local pimp, sees when he needs "a hundred clams" to get out of town. But Bob doesn't like pimps. He shoos Marc away from Anne, a potential recruit to whom Bob himself takes a liking. Without Bob's help, Marc has to throw himself on the mercy of the police by promising to be a stool pigeon.

Isabel Corey was 27 at the time of Bob Le Flambeur's release according to IMDB, but Daniel Cauchy claims that she was only 15 when they started filming. Judge for yourself.

After a busy day of gambling in which he wins at the race track only to blow everything at the casino, Bob's made aware that the casino keeps up to 800,000,000 francs in its vaults on big race days. He gets the odd notion to steal all the money and starts putting a team together, including an ace safecracker and his young protege Paolo (Cauchy), who has hooked up with Anne. Paolo and Anne are young, personable and dumb. He boasts to her of the money he'll make from the casino robbery, and she boasts of that to Marc, who's still trying to make some moves on her -- not without success, either. But the speed with which Marc takes off makes her suspicious and worried that she's made a mistake. She goes to Bob, who gives her a good slap but appreciates that she went to him quickly. Marc did go to the cops, but he stalled them by saying he needed more details. That means the cops don't know the full story by the time Paolo catches up with Marc and kills him.

But the cops learn more when a croupier who'd provided inside information on the casino is goaded by his nosy wife into demanding a bigger cut of the loot. Failing to get satisfaction from Bob's gang, the croupier goes to the police. The inspector is actually dining with Bob at the time and warning him to stay out of trouble. But it's only a matter of time before the cops know what's up. Will Bob's gang be able to keep on schedule, especially when Bob himself forgets the schedule during an unprecedented run of luck at the roulette and baccarat tables?...

With every French crime film I see I'm better able to distinguish the prevailing sensibility from the American hard-boiled and noir styles. The hard-boiled style is defined by its insistent mocking humor, as if grounded in a philosophy that life is a big joke on everyone. Film noir is marked by a fatalism that often verges on self-pity. The French genre seems comparatively less jokey and less sentimental. The typical tone is something like a cold-eyed sense of tragedy, expressed in Bob Le Flambeur when Melville the off-screen narrator describes Bob as "just as nature made him" when his gambling fixation screws up the casino caper. In American noir there's a sense, perhaps insisted upon by the Production Code, that things could have been different for the genre's doomed protagonists. The French seem to think differently; Bob's story could only end as it does, because of Bob's nature.

The odd thing about Bob Le Flambeur, however, is exactly how it ends. If you've been following along, you've figured out that Paolo, Bob's young protege, gets gunned down in the climactic gunfight outside the casino. Bob himself seems to be to blame because of his lucrative dithering at the gambling tables. If you found Paolo sympathetic, you might want Bob to get some comeuppance. Indeed, he is arrested at the end, but all that money he won was won fairly, and is his to keep. Bob may end up facing no more than 3-5 for his role in the scheme, and as the script notes, he can now afford a really good lawyer. His last word is that he may even go on to sue the police! Something seems wrong here, at least to an American viewer. Maybe Melville has found Bob too lovable to suffer the sort of ruin that seems more appropriate here. The director and co-writer keeps less emotional distance from Bob than from his later protagonists, and that may be why this movie, for all its virtues, seems less rigorous than Melville's work from the 1960s and 1970s.

That said, the film is still very much characteristically Melvillian. It has plenty of location atmosphere, and the actors are effective even if not on the level of the titans Melville would work with later (Belmondo, Ventura, Delon). Bob is not as tense as the later Melville films I've seen, simply because Bob is a less edgy character. But the movie reminds me in a good way of American doomed-caper films like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, the former of which was apparently an acknowledged influence. And it has one element that must have been indispensable to a Melville crime movie: a nightclub with a floor show.

I'm sorry. That was just a photo taken on ladies' night. Here's the floor show.

Anyway, if you have your choice of Melvilles, check out this one if you want to follow his career in historic order, but if you want the really good stuff, go for Le Deuxieme Souffle or Army of Shadows. Bob Le Flambeur is merely good, but the others are great. I'll let the trailer make its case, including an extraordinary claim for Isabel Corey in the year of Brigitte Bardot's emergence into superstardom.