Throughout his career, Jean-Pierre Melville retained a passion for all things American and especially for the classic Hollywood gangster and noir movies. He eagerly borrowed the iconography of the genre – the snap-brim hats, the belted trench coats, the crooned music, the cars and nightclubs, but made its conventions entirely his own, tailored on his highly stylised world. Melville’s films are marked by their silences. Melville’s men are without women. In American noirs, it is often the femme fatale whom he falls for that brings the morally ambiguous hero alienated from society his doomed fate. There is no room for sentimentality in Melville’s films. They are focused on masculinity.
“Le samouraï”, 1967
There is no one responsible for Melville’s anti-hero’s fate but himself. It is his destiny. He is destined for sacrifice, or self-destruction. In Le samouraï, we are signaled Jef Costello’s fate from the very beginning of the movie. The silence. Him alone in the room. The bird singing in the cage. Symbols of complete solitude and imprisonment… in his own destiny. Melville makes great use of circumstantial symbolism, remarks film historian Antoine Coppola, an element encountered in classic Japanese cinema. The character, the dignity, the gracefulness, the excrutiating attention to detail, the rigorous, even religious minimalist style, from Delon’s acting to the mise-en-scène, the importance given to a death-driven figure – it’s like a rite, and all these elements draw inspiration from the Japanese culture and cinema. But whatever the influence, Melville’s films are his own, an individualistic genre, infused by understatement and a sense of cool, an idealised world of mobsters and thugs, living and dying by a certain code of honour. Melville’s characters are their own. And they dress the part.
“When an author becomes an adjective,
it means that he’s entered a higher category.
We say ‘Melvillian’ in the same way that we say ‘Fellinian’ or ‘Hitchcockian'”.
Philippe Labro
Roger Duchesne in “Bob le flambeur”, 1956
Roger Duchesne in Bob le flambeur, 1956
Bob le flambeur is about the crooks, losers and high rollers on the streets and boulevards. Jean-Pierre Melville took his camera out in the streets four years before Breathless (1960) and Bob le flambeur is often considered the first Nouvelle Vague film or the precursor of the Nouvelle Vague. Rui Nogueira, who wrote Melville on Melville, a book-length interview in 1971, goes even earlier than that, to Melville’s first film, Le silence de la mer (1947), which was filmed on location, under precarious conditions, with no budget, with anything that was available, when he talks about the director of the father of the French New Wave. Melville concurred: “The New Wave? I invented it in 1937”, referring to a detective film he made alone and with no money, using stock found on the black market. “What the new filmmakers are doing, I wanted to do in 1937. Unfortunately, I was only able to do it in 1947, with Le silence de la mer“, he told Bertrand Tavernier in the magazine L’Étrave.
Roger Duchesne is Bob Montagné, an unlucky gambler and failed bank robber. He glides through gambling rooms and Pigalle nightclubs “in those moments between day and night… between heaven and hell”, as the narration goes. Bob lives by a certain code de l’honneur, he is a gentleman crook, his word is his bond, he always gives a hand to those in the spot. Melville’s intention was to make a film about a robbery when he wrote the script in 1950, but then John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle came out and “I could no longer deal, either dramatically or tragically, with the preparation and execution of a robbery”, he told Nogueira, so Bob became more of a “comedy of manners”.
And that’s what makes Bob le flambeur interesting: the film is not about the heist, but about Bob staying true to his essence. He is a gambler. He lives by night, and his clothes show it. His trench coat and fedora look authentic, crumpled, lived in. “The trench coats and the hats in later Melville films”, remarks Thierry Crifo, writer and scriptwriter, in the documentary Diary of A Villain, “are crisp and clean, but Bob le Flambeur isn’t clean; I mean the close-ups, night, his 3-day stubble, his trench coat, I find that more believable.” Bob’s character belongs to Roger Duchesne, and that may be partly because Duchesne himself was a gambler in real life. He had accumulated debts because of which Melville actually had to ask the permission of the villains in Pigalle for Duchesne to come back there and film. “The face of a crook”, says Bob staring at himself in a window, adjusting his tie, dressed in his trench coat and fedora hat. It truly feels like he’s playing himself, wearing his own clothes, true to his nature.
Jean Paul Belmondo in “Le doulos”, 1963
Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le doulos, 1963
A tale of loyalty and betrayal among thieves, an elegant exploration of underworld duplicity, Le doulos was the birth of the detective story, Melville-style. It marked the start of the director’s most important period, “the most flourishing and aesthetically pleasing period of his career”, as Denitza Bantcheva, writer of Jean-Pierre Melville – de l’œuvre à l’homme, concludes. Le doulos was also the first detective film that was referred to as metaphysical, Bantcheva continues. There is a philosophical reflection on human destiny and on what influences one’s fate, like the interaction between people, the role played by chance, misunderstanding and circumstance, and this existential theme would indeed be present in all Melville’s films from then on.
The film has Serge Reggiani as Maurice Faugel, a robber who has just done time, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as Silien, a safe-cracker who labours under the reputation of a police informant (“doulos” means hat, the gangster’s favoured felt Fedora, but is also slang for “stoolpigeon”). His clothes are the first sign in regard to the ambiguity of his character. Unlike Reggiani’s Faugel, whose creased, well-worn trench reminds of Bob le flambeur’ faithful representation of real-life gangsters, Belmondo’s Silien paves the way towards that clean and crisp aesthetic from Melville’s later films that Thierry Crifo was mentioning. Melville thought Belmondo was perfect for the part, and in Melville’s films we see a Belmondo that does not exist anywhere else, remarks Denitza Bantcheva. His expressions are subtle and refined, his facial movement is minimal, which is the exact opposite of Belmondo’s naturally lively and exuberant acting style.
Appearance is important to Silien, he dresses carefully, wears fine clothes, his trench and hat and suit and coat are peerlessly cool. “You pay for those clothes by selling newspapers?” is what two policemen ask him during an interrogation, hinting at “improper” ways of getting them. Because, you see, there are certain unwritten rules which crooks don’t brake. Faugel uses the expression “proper crooks” in Le doulos, meaning that crooks, Melville’s crooks that is, don’t betray their own kind, they stick with each other, they don’t rat, they are rooted in the male code of honour. “I’m going to leave, I’m going to live somewhere, a place without cops and crooks, if that exists”, says Silien at one point. Maybe he knows he doesn’t belong with any of them. His character evokes feelings of both escape and imprisonment. With his inscrutable charm, Belmondo represents a loner, but also the damned on whom destiny is hovering over, regardless of whether he’s on the good guys’ or on the bad guys’ side.
Alain Delon in “Le samouraï”, 1967
Alain Delon in Le samouraï, 1967
In Le samouraï, Alain Delon recedes in the safety of his trench coat. It’s his armour. Together with the tilted downward hat, the trench is also part of what has come to define the protagonist of films noir. But he’s a different kind of noir anti-hero. He’s Melville’s noir anti-hero. Like a samourai, Jef Costello abides by a code of conduct and leads a solitary existence. His dressing is like a ritual, systematically putting on his hat and coat before going out to get a job done. Everything about him is cool and calculated. It’s like he is fitting himself for battle.
Le samourai is a film that extracts its substance from cinema and belongs to the cinemas, so it uses words only when absolutely necessary and vital, said Rui Nogueira in an interview. Melville considered Alain Delon one of the greatest French actors. When the director came to Delon’s house to read him the script for the film, after seven or eight minutes of reading, Alain suddenly looked at his watch and said “There hasn’t been a line of dialogue. That’s good enough for me; I’m making this film.” And when the actor heard the name of the script, he beckoned Melville to follow him, went into his bedroom where a samourai sword hung over the bed. The bedroom was decorated in Japanese style, with the rigor and austerity you might expect in a samourai’s room. This was one of those films which were meant to be.
In a career-defining performance, in the role of a Parisian contract killer who has realised he is being double crossed by his employees and seeks revenge, Alain Delon conjures Melville’s perfect anti-hero. Delon’s exceptional good looks and impeccable look meet Melville’s idea of the gangster as an image. Clothes make the man in Le Samouraï. Everything is simple, stark, clean-cut, primordial to his lifestyle – the trim grey suit, the black slim tie and white button-down shirt, another black suit, the inky wool coat, the hat, the trench. Delon is dressed with the finest precision, but he seems completely unaware of his appearance. He’s completely detached from everything, hardly betraying an emotion. It’s part of the job, of his profession. He lives and kills alone. There is a scene towards the beginning of the film, where Delon, stopped at a traffic light, is watched admiringly by a pretty young woman. His body language is minimal and signals that he has noticed her gaze, but he only gives her a blank look and turns away, without even satisfying her with a smile. Nothing distracts him from his fateful path.
Yves Montand in “Le cercle rouge”, 1970
Yves Montand in Le cercle rouge, 1970
For Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville returned to the heist story he had wanted to do in Bob le flambeur. It’s about two professional crooks, fresh-out-of-jail Corey (Alain Delon) and Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), who has just escaped arrest, and another man, an alcoholic ex-cop, Jansen (Yves Montand), who takes on the job as a rehabilitating exercise. It is in Le cercle rouge, more so than in his other films, that Melville’s austere stylistic magnificence leads to a more profound connection with his characters and his stories of unwritten, deep rules of right and wrong that the men of the underworld live by.
But I don’t want to steer away from Melville’s technical mastermind, and the theme of the robbery itself, because the almost half-hour-long, wordless, intense, magnificent heist is cinema making in its most pure form. It’s one of the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema. After the film ended this second time I watched it a couple of weeks ago (I have recently rewatched all Melville’s movies after many years), I immediately played that entire sequence again. And I would like to quote Philippe Labro, writer and filmmaker, who notes: “When Melville shoots Yves Montand climbing then descending and then climbing the stairs of the building in which the astonishing heist in Le cercle rouge is going to happen, he takes his time, all his time, and we are fascinated by the action precisely because it goes on for a long time, and because it announces another action. Time, according to Melville, allows the suspense to be established and the tragedy to be built.”
In a true Melvillian crime style, all the leading characters in Le cercle rouge are crooks, cops and crooked cops. The trench coat is their dress code. Everyone from Delon to Bourvil (finally cast against type and who impeccably plays the inspector) wears one, but it is Montand who captured my attention. It’s maybe because he dresses well to hide reality. He almost dresses too well. A new job and good clothes are his ticket out of the rout, his way of regaining self-respect. At one point in the script, Jansen is described as follows: “Jansen, stretched out on his bed, fully dressed, filthy, unshaven, with a three-day beard. Like Faulkner in one of his alcoholic bouts.” He has harrowing hallucinations under the influence of alcohol, he’s sweating, disheveled, his shirt is dirty, he wears a slouchy coat.
But then he gets a call from Alain Delon and when he answers the phone we are given a glimpse into his past life and a completely different man – there is a beautiful, striking shot of Montand at his lowest having as background a Louis Vuitton trunk, elegant clothes and accessories. He is given this new job, and the next time we see him, when he meets Delon in the nightclub, his transformation is superb. Melville shows him starting from his polished black shoes upwards, to the perfectly cut suit, tailored grey coat, striped shirt, slim knitted tie, and fedora. He is dressed impeccably and his look only gets better from that point on. In the heist scene he appears in la pièce de résistance, tuxedo, white shirt and bow-tie, and trench coat on top. He is the cool, composed, concise, and adept elite sniper again.
sources: “Melville on Melville”, by Rui Nogueira / interview with Thierry Crifo in the documentary Diary of A Villain / interview with Denitza Bantcheva in the documentary “Birth of the Detective Story – Melville Style” / interview with Florence Moncorgé-Gabin / interview with film historian Antoine Coppola in the documentary “In the Mood for Melville” / interviews with Rui Nogueira and Ginette Vincendeau, author of “Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris” (all documentaries available in the Jean-Pierre Melville collection released by StudioCanal and on the Blu-ray Le samouraï released by The Criterion Collection)
