Le Cercle Rouge

Jean-Pierre Melville returns to the neo-noir with Le Cercle Rouge (1970), his next-to-last film. Similar in structure to Jules Dassin's Rififi, it's another stylized tale of French cops and robbers.

Corey (Alain Delon) receives a tip for a jewel heist right after leaving jail. He teams up with fugitive Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte) and Jansen (Yves Montand), a sharpshooting ex-cop. The heist goes perfectly, but the criminals run afoul of Captain Mattei (Andre Bouvril), already tracking Vogel. Mattei is a ruthless investigator who uses methods fair and foul to trap the crooks.

Le Cercle Rouge sees Melville return to his favorite theme, criminals bound to a code of honor. This theme is introduced comically: Corey doesn't bat an eye when Vogel sneaks into his car trunk. Vogel soon repays the favor by shooting two rival gangsters. Jansen suffers from guilt and alcoholism but proves meticulous. The three men form an unlikely comradeship: even when one backs out of the proceeds he risks his life to rescue the others. This contrasts with the unscrupulous Mattei, who's not above entrapping informers and outright trickery to nab his prey. Melville's contrast of criminal chivalry with police ruthlessness prefigures John Woo and Michael Mann's crime sagas.

Le Cercle Rouge is an exercise in style, its simple plot and abstract characters secondary to Melville's direction. He presages Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal in showing the criminals' preparations and the police manhunt in meticulous, almost tedious detail. The movie builds tension efficiently, paying off with the actual heist. Running over ten minutes, it's a remarkable sequence, all impenetrable shadows and tense sounds, staged without music and little dialogue. The more conventional action and outdoor photography pale in comparison.

Alain Delon repeats his minimalist turn from Le Samourai, adding a bushy mustache and wry sense of humor. Yves Montand underplays Jansen's alcoholism and moral shadiness quite well. Even Gian Maria Volonte, so delightfully hammy in his Spaghetti Westerns, dials down as a desperate, hunted criminal. The standout is Andre Bouvril, making his final appearance. Best-known as an amiable comedy star, Bouvril plays brilliantly against-type as the implacable inspector.

Le Cercle Rouge won't offer much new to Melville fans. From this director though, more of the same certainly isn't a bad thing.

Le Samourai

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) is a low-key masterwork. Melville influenced two generations of filmmakers with his stoic protagonist and meditative direction. Yet this striking neo-noir occupies a class of its own.

Hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) kills a nightclub owner and gets nabbed by the police. Though he establishes an alibi with a girlfriend (Nathalie Delon), Costello remains the Superintendent's (Francois Perrier) chief suspect. Jef dodges the cops and his double-crossing employer, being drawn to Valerie (Cathy Rosier), a nightclub musician who refused to identify him to the police. Yet Jef's employer offers him another job which hits closer to home.

Le Samourai oozes style. Melville provides meditative long takes and extended sequences, all conveyed with a minimum of dialogue. The opening shots of Jef in his lonely apartment set the tone, oppressive yet absorbing. The sparse plot allows Melville to focus on set pieces, from the prolonged police line-up to a frantic subway chase. The best scene has Jef ferreting out a wiretap, using his pet canary's chirping to distract eavesdroppers. Melville successful weds expressive direction with plays on genre tropes.

Melville cribs his plot from the noir This Gun for Hire (1942) but borrows the rituals and language of Westerns and samurai films. The title posits Jef as a modern-day ronin, a masterless killer cast adrift by his inscrutable code. Constantly alone, he uses people as tools without forging meaningful connections. Viewers might connect Jef to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name but lacks his grudging morality. If Jef resembles any Leone character, it's Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes: "When I'm paid, I always see the job through!"

Alain Delon defines stoic. Jef rarely changes expressions or registers emotion, a Zen killer determined to control his emotions with his fate. Delon proves compelling through raw charisma, chiseled looks and cryptic gestures. Is this a great performance or a living embodiment of the Kuleshov effect? Either way Delon makes a unique antihero. 

Nathalie Delon (Alain's then-wife) plays Jef's beleaguered girlfriend. Cathy Rosier gets the most interesting character, a girl with motives as indecipherable as Jef's. Francois Perrier (Z) plays the dogged police inspector, with Jacques Leroy as a sleazy go-between.

Le Samourai is a classic. Its protagonist presaged four decades of antisocial antiheroes from The Conversation to Drive, but Melville's stellar craftsmanship remains the gold standard.

Army of Shadows

In between gritty crime dramas (Le Samourai, Red Circle), Jean-Pierre Melville delivers Army of Shadows (1969). This unsparingly grim film demolishes Hollywood's romantic view of the French Resistance. If anything, it's too downbeat for its own good.

Mild-mannered engineer Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) organizes a Resistance cell. After escaping German custody in 1942, his network engages in various activities against the Vichy puppet regime. They ferret out informers, rescue Allied POWs and smuggle supplies from London. Things go awry when Gerbier's aide Lepercq (Paul Crachet) is arrested and tortured by the Gestapo - a development leading to Gerbier's own arrest. With the help of fearless Mathilde (Simone Signoret) the Resistance rescues Gerbier. But Gerbier might not return the favor when the Nazis entrap Mathilde into becoming an informant.

Melville works off a Joseph Kessel novel but his own Resistance experience undoubtedly shapes Army of Shadows. The protagonists are never less than heroic, but their actions seem almost pointless in the grand scheme of war. Every Resistance success is met by a setback, be it a violent reprisal or a chance arrest, and their British sponsors barely trust them. Even Gerbier's visit to London is marred by an air raid and a near-disastrous return. The Germans and their Vichy allies have debased France, their violence forcing Gerbier's cell into squalid acts of reprisal. Melville's lack of sensationalism is Army's strong point.

Besides a striking black-and-blue palette, all brooding shadows and dark corridors, Melville visually emphasizes the war's dehumanization. He opens with SS troops parading past the Arc de Triomphe, a tone-setting juxtaposition. Melville repeats key images - prisoners bound in a chair, the framed slats of buses, basements and prison cells - that show France's violation, physical and psychic, by German occupation.  Melville utilizes New Wave jump cuts and narration to great effect: witness the tense scene where Gerbier gets a shave from a Petainist barber, or Gerbier's refusing to flee Gestapo machine guns.

Army of Shadows is so bleak it's often hard to watch. One admires Melville for avoiding escapist thrills, yet there's little room to breathe amidst the oppressive atmosphere. Our heroes' only reward comes when Charles De Gaulle decorates a Resistance leader (which angered French critics, coming a year after the May '68 uprisings). In this context, the downer ending proves a foregone conclusion. Melville's episodic plot forces Army to work moment-by-moment, not always to its benefit. Fortunately, Meville's cast provides an engaging human element.

Lino Ventura scores with a quiet turn. He's outwardly stiff and no-nonsense, his inner conflict betrayed only by snatches of narration. Simone Signoret gets a standout role as a seemingly ordinary yet endlessly resourceful Frenchwoman. Christian Barbier plays Le Bison, a glowering Legionnaire who proves unexpectedly sensitive. Paul Meurrise and Jean-Pierre Cassel play unsentimental Resistance chiefs.

Army of Shadows isn't a film for those seeking conventional excitement. For those who like their war movies dark and downscale, it's a perfect match.