Jean-Pierre Melville

Alain Delon plays the cop, Richard Crenna the thief, and Catherine Deneuve is with one of them and sleeping with the other. For his last film, Jean-Pierre Melville (“Le Samouraï”) stayed true to form with a noir thriller that’s thick with atmosphere and played ice-cold. — Out of season and in the rain, four men walk into a bank on the seafront at Saint-Jean-de-Monts, and one of them is wounded by the time they come out. Their boss, Simon, runs a nightclub in Paris. The case lands on the desk of Commissaire Coleman, an old acquaintance of Simon’s who also happens to be sleeping with Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy.

Jean-Pierre Melville (“Le Samouraï”) stages it like a ballet: for half an hour Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Gian Maria Volontè rob a jeweller’s on the Place Vendôme without a word of dialogue, and every gesture and glance counts. It’s noir made new, and nobody who has seen that heist forgets it. — Corey leaves prison in Marseille with a tip about a jeweller’s in Paris, and on the drive up, a fugitive who has slipped his police escort is hiding in the boot of his car. The job still needs a crack shot, and they find one in a former policeman who is drinking himself to death. All the while, Commissaire Mattei is closing in.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance fighters know they will soon be dead, and they go towards it without heroics or speeches. French critics dismissed the film as Gaullist propaganda in 1969, but today it counts among the most important French war films ever made. — In France in 1942, someone hands Philippe Gerbier’s name to the Germans, and the engineer ends up in a camp. Once he escapes, his world shrinks to forged papers, safe houses and comrades who will never know each other’s real names. And he sets out to find the person who gave him away.

Melville (“Le Samouraï”) loved American noir and it shows, and Tarantino, who calls this his favourite screenplay ever, carried some of it into “Reservoir Dogs”. The title is slang for a hat and the informer who wears it. Jean-Paul Belmondo wears the hat, but as for the rest, who knows? — Maurice is barely out of prison before he’s back at work, lining up a break-in at a villa in Neuilly with an old partner. For the keys and a gun he turns to Silien, a man the whole underworld says is an informer. Maurice gives him the address all the same. — Grand Jury Prize | Faro Island Film Festival | 1962