Jean-Pierre Melville – Movie Musings

Melville delivers one of his patented, stripped-back, gangster films full of monochromatic Bogart-like cool

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Alain Delon (Corey), André Bourvil (Inspector Mattei), Gian Maria Volonté (Vogel), Yves Montand (Jansen), Paul Crauchet (The receiver), Paul Amiot (Chief of Police), Pierre Collet (Prison guard), André Ekyan (Rico), Jean-Pierre Posier (Mattei’s assistant), François Périer (Santi)

Can you have honour among thieves? Perhaps only when all of you sink or swim together. Three men need a big score and will stick together to get it. Corey (Alain Delon) has the tip-off about a high-end jewellery store, ripe for turning over. He needs the money, as he’s earned the enmity of gang boss Rico (André Ekyan), who repaid Corey’s years of jail-time silence by shacking up with Corey’s girl. Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) is on-the-run after a daring train escape from dedicated Inspector Mattei (André Bourvil). And retired police sharp-shooter Jansen (Yves Montand) just needs a reason to stop hitting the bottle. All of them will come together for a heist.

It’s a classic journey for Melville, another exploration of the director’s love for stripped-back cool with a bunch of broodingly silent 40s throwback crooks in Bogartian-rain-jackets puffing cigarettes and going about their dirty-but-strangely-honourable business in a monochromatic world of nightclubs and hideouts. So far, in fact, so Le Samouraï, Melville’s previous Delon starrer, with Le Cercle Rouge echoing that film’s mix of stripped-back Bresson simplicity with French New Wave existentialism. Like that film, this also starts with an import-filled opening quote (claiming to be from the Buddha) which in fact, Melville actually made-up.

Le Cercle Rouge was a film Melville had planned to make years earlier – only for Rififi to come along and execute (flawlessly) his central conceit of a heist conducted in deadly-cool silence. (“They’re not much for talking” Mattei drily observes here when watching the surveillance footage.) But enough time had gone by for the idea to feel fresh again and the heist is another masterfully forensic piece of Melville-magic, that soaks itself in the detail of carefully executed timing, pin-point marksmanship, just a touch of ruthless violence and unflappable cool. (He even speeds us over the duller parts of the prep with skilfully executed wipes). Montand even gets a kick-ass moment of marksmanship that nearly raises a cheer.

The thieves go about much of their work with ice-cold professionalism. We’ve already had Corey’s anti-authoritarian cool well-established, as he effortlessly disarms and steals a bundle of cash from the furious (and humiliated) Rico before casually besting in a pool-hall punch-up two of Rico’s heavies (Corey doesn’t hesitate to take down the first man in seconds with a pool cue). He’s similarly unphased by taking his new car through a police road-block – neither is he anything more than wryly amused when he spots (naturally, while supping an expresso and cigarette) Vogel climbing into the boot of said car to avoid the cops. Its Delon to a tee, here playing to the hilt the casual, confident cool of a guy who knows he’s pretty much tougher than anyone else in the room.

He’s meets a match of sort in Vogel – in what Melville develops into his idea of bromance, where the bros are two hoods who bound over popping a couple of hitmen. Vogel’s escape from the police has a wildness to it that’s almost missing in the rest of the film until its end, a desperate dive through a window and a helter-skelter run through the forest dodging bullets. There is more twitch in Gian Maria Volonté, but when he decides to trust Corey – and Melville captures this moment with a striking fourth-wall-breaking stare in turn from both actors straight down the camera – he’s all in. So much so, Corey is confident that when Rico’s thugs catch up with him moments later, Vogel will be on hand to dispatch the pair of them, and the two remain inseparable (Corey even loaning Vogel his spare pyjamas) throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s these bonds of loyalty that are an underlying theme to Le Cercle Rouge. In a crime world full of bounders who constantly betray those around them – from Rico’s betrayal of Corey to François Périer’s excellently grimy boss Santi only slightly reluctantly turning informer to make his life easier – these men stand out. The cops seem little better: Melville’s policemen are frequently heavy-handed (Mattei frustratedly has to slap down one cop for pushing Santi’s kid almost to breaking point in a manufactured case set up as a light bit of quid-pro-quo with the gangster), have little loyalty for each other and reach for their guns at every opportunity. Corey’s prison guard is on the take and ex-sharp-shooter Jansen left the force because the corruption was sinking into his soul.

Probably why Jansen is now a drunk, Melville introducing him with a strikingly surreal Buñuel-inspired nightmare, where the sweating Montand imagines jerky, giant spiders, then rats and snakes crawling over him in his gin-soaked bedsit. Nevertheless, Montand has his own code of honour: the job is not about the money, but the chance to chuck the demon drink. And he’s got as much contempt for the police’s corruption as anyone, despite that proudly framed police pistol on his wall. Montand’s nervy attempts to hide his booze dependency are well-done, and Melville executes some fine tension by not showing us the results of Jansen’s pre-heist shooting practice, showing us only Montand’s ambiguous face as he inspects the target.

Arrayed against them, André Bourvil brings a Maigret-like quality to Inspector Mattei – the guy who goes home to his classically-named cats, who he dotes on like a loving dad – but when action comes, he’s just as ruthless as anyone, for all his softly spoken professionalism. He’ll lie, cheat and steal to get evidence or witness co-operation and is as quick to pull his gun (and as deadly with it) as the most hardened criminal. In this cruel, winner-takes-all game of cops-and-robbers (and it’s hard not to spot Michael Mann’s Heat owes a huge debt to Le Cercle Rouge, right down to matching his cooly monochrome visuals) he’s as determined to win as anyone.

Le Cercle Rouge has an odd ending, all characters converging almost with a sense of magical realism in one place, at one time. Of course, this echoes the words of Melville’s opening words of men coming together, on a said day, in the red circle – but then you remember that this quote is just some bollocks Melville made up and it was probably written to add a little bit of philosophical justification to what would otherwise be a very sudden and shallowly plotted, fortuitously unlikely, arrival of every character in a key location at the same time. With the expected deadly results.

Le Cercle Rouge though is taut, chilled and cool Melville at his best, with a dark air of danger throughout and a host of characters playing metaphorical chess while puffing cigarettes and looking unflustered. And, when it comes to that sort of thing, few did it better than Melville.

Melville’s iconic and enigmatic hitman film is the epitome of stripped-back cool

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Alain Delon (Jef Costello), François Périer (Superintendent), Nathalie Delon (Jane Lagrange), Cathy Rosier (Valérie), Jacques Leroy (Man in the passageway), Michel Boisrand (Bartender), Jean-Pierre Posier (Olivier Rey), Catherine Jourdain (Hatcheck girl), André Salgues (Mechanic)

Every professional has his own code, his way of going about business. Why should a hired killer be any different? Jef Costello (Alain Delon) kills for money, but follows his own samurai-inspired code, going about his assignments with methodical preparation and ritualistic regularity, with his hands always covered with white gloves and his fedora at just the right angle. Le Samouraï is partly about how far Costello will go to follow his self-appointed rules. What about when a nightclub hit goes wrong, the piano-playing witness Valérie (Cathy Rosier) may or may not be protecting him, the investigating Superintendent (François Périer) is sure it’s him and the man who hired Jef decides he’s a loose end that needs tying up?

All this comes together in Melville’s stripped back, effortlessly cool mix of Hollywood noir and French New-Wave existentialism shot in a series of chilled greys that makes the film feel like a slice of monochrome 40s throwback. It’s Melville’s mix of the observational, forensic cinema of the likes of Bresson, told with the poetry of Cocteau and with more than a splash of Hawks. It makes for a film quite unlike many others, which sometimes has the logic of a dream, where the hero dresses like he’s stumbled in from Raymond Chandler and lives by a code encapsulated by an opening Bushido quote that Melville made up. It also cemented the filmic idea of the hitman as a mix of sociopath and poet, a consummate professional endlessly attractive in his unflappability sticking loyally to his personal code that shaped everything from Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal right up to John Wick.

Melville’s direction is pin-point perfect, every moment perfectly framed to bring just the right measure of cool and chill. It could almost be a silent – there is no dialogue for the first ten minutes and the dénouement returns to silence as we attempt to fathom Jef’s final cryptic motives – and Melville shoots the careful, forensic detail of Jef’s life with hypnotic mastery. Watching Jef go about, with (mostly) unflappable calm, the preparatory steps for a killing is gripping: stealing a car with a huge ring of possible ignition keys, buying weapons, dressing to perfection, scouting out the territory. It’s a film that’s endlessly fascinated with procedure: it gives almost the same time to the police’s less successful attempts to bug Jef’s apartment, in what becomes a game of move and counter-move.

It’s also a film that builds suspense through the gradual accumulation of facts and events. Jef’s hit in the club sees is no wham-bam affair, but filmed like a prowling tiger in its terrain, with Jef move from room-to-room mapping out his escape route. Two confrontations with a rival hitman, sent by his employers, masterfully feature slow build-ups to sudden bursts of action. An attempt by the police to trail Jef on the Metro cuts superbly back and forth from the police control room, the policemen following Jef to Jef himself, small moments shifting the advantage in the chase here and there.

In a superb performance of unreadable motives and feelings, Alain Delon creates a character who would leave a profound influence on every film hitman to follow. Jef is a man as distant, featureless and anonymous as his apartment (which is grey, contains only the most basic furniture and no possessions at all beyond his caged bird which is as much as an early warning system as pet). He buries himself in his role, keeps all other people distant (his girlfriend, played by Delon’s then wife Nathalie seems to mean little to him other than as an unshakable alibi source via her jealous fiancée) and seems devoid of emotion. It’s hard to imagine him expressing attachment for anyone or anything else (does he really feed that bird?). He’s cool though, because very few characters are as seemingly certain of who or what they are than Jef.

Which is going to be shaken when employers, witnesses and others start to break the expectations of his code. How far does Jef’s personal code of honour, loyalty to contracts and refusal to create collateral damage stretch? His killings are conducted in person – with paid targets greeted with an almost polite apology. But when his employers break the deal, targeting him – it seems nothing will shake him from extracting retribution. The only person who attracts anything approaching his anger is his mysterious employer – witnesses of his crime, other hitmen, the police are all just doing their job like him: but for the boss who broke his word, no threat or bribe will stop Jef. Sticking to the letter of his word is behind the film’s enigmatic ending and you could see the film’s conclusion as the perverse logical end of a philosophy of absolute honour.

Melville’s film drips in classic Americana cool, alongside it’s very Parisian locations. Jef can chew hard-bitten dialogue like a gumshoe and treat his girlfriend with a high-handed dismissiveness that fit him into a host of noirs. Really of course, Jef would be easily caught: despite the struggles of witnesses to identity him, could he look more distinctive in his fedora and Bogart raincoat? Not to mention those attention drawing gloves, that he whips off on completion of the killing to leave fingerprints everywhere? That sort of logic doesn’t matter in a film where it feels like the world is moving forward with the grim, inescapable inevitability of a dream.

There is, among the detailed realism a real sense of the unreal about Le Samouraï right from the start with Melville’s distinctive sharp zoom-in-then-out on Jef’s bed as he sits blowing cigarette smoke in the air. The witness, Valérie, has an unreal, ethereal quality about her, unshaken by seeing Jef at work and drawing him deeper into a situation full of traps and danger like some sort of angel of death. (There is a fair bit of Orphée in Le Samouraï, with an enigmatic hero drawn tighter and tighter into a world of strange rules and hard to predict outcomes). Melville’s film casts such a hypnotic magic that you even forget no real adherent to a Samurai code would ever kill for money.

It comes together in a super-cool, cut-back film of strikingly beautiful noirish images in a world seemingly with no colour at all. But also, a film that is surprisingly complex, considering its enigmatic hero, whose actions and decisions remain open to interpretation and discussion. It’s a film of fascinating contradictions, shot with observational realism but with the logic and unreality of a dream, mixing pulpy thrills with existential pondering. Its absorbing, magisterial and quite unlike almost anything else you could name.