The 1960s crime film that still shocks
According to writer Raymond Chandler, a story involving crime “must be about real people in a real world”. However if this is true, then it’s a mystery as to why Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1962 film Le Doulos, an undisputed classic screen tale of crime which recently celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, works as well as it does. With its moody atmosphere, twisting narrative and lonely streak of pessimism, Melville’s film on the one hand epitomises the harder, rawer, more authentic end of crime cinema, and in particular French crime cinema. Yet, with its creation of a highly Americanised Paris, one that arguably only existed in such a way in Melville’s films, the world it depicts is simultaneously fantastical; such is the endlessly contradictory nature of the director and his celebrated work. In Le Doulos’s case especially, those rich contradictions made for a film that truly redefined the crime drama genre and left its mark on cinema history.
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Crime cinema in France is synonymous with the enigmatic Melville. Though working in a number of genres, Melville defined how crime especially could work on French screens in a traumatised world still reeling from the aftermath of World War Two. The secret of his success? This idiosyncratic mix of US influence and Gallic style which lends his films an air of slick brutality.
As one of Melville’s most famous fans Quentin Tarantino put it: “He took the Bogart, Cagney, the Warner Brothers gangster films, and a lot of times he just took the stories from them and did them with Belmondo or [Alain] Delon or Jean Gabin and just gave them a different style, a different coolness… they were still trying to be like their American counterparts, but they had a different rhythm all their own.” It was a style that became incredibly influential thanks to Le Doulos, above all.
With his distinctive air of hopelessness and his uncompromising vision of rubble-strewn Paris, Melville was aptly like the directorial equivalent of his leading characters; sardonic loners who obstinately refused to compromise. Beginning his career in the late 1940s, Melville was too old to ride the French New Wave that took off a decade later, spearheaded by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Yet neither was he part of the earlier movements of the Tradition de la qualité (the older mode of French cinema) seen in films by the likes of Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné.
Notable for its cold, masculine urbanity and stark violence, Melville’s crime cinema was both thrilling and existentialist. Writer and lecturer Geoff Andrew curated a season at the BFI in 2017 dedicated to the director and his unique position in French cinema. Unlike the New Wave pioneers, “Melville was emphatically not a realist, but a fabulist, a moralist and a stylist,” Andrew tells BBC Culture. The director evidently stood alone.
Though beginning his crime cinema in 1956 with Bob le flambeur, Melville really hit his stride with Le Doulos. The title is a slang reference to the hat worn by shady criminals at the time, not dissimilar to the Fedoras and Trilbies worn by gangsters in earlier American films. Because such hats somewhat obscured the face into shadow, the term came to mean those who were police informants; those with something to hide.
A tale of paranoid masculinity
Based on the 1957 novel by Pierre V Lesou, Le Doulos has a murky narrative. The film revolves around the lives of several criminals and policemen, chiefly Maurice (Serge Reggiani) and his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Just out from prison, Maurice visits Gilbert (René Lefèvre) who is examining jewels obtained from a recent heist. Maurice murders Gilbert in revenge for a betrayal not seen on screen and buries the loot before two other gangsters, Nuttheccio (Michel Piccoli) and Armand (Jacques de Leon), arrive to collect it but find only a corpse.
In spite of being just out of prison, Maurice plans a robbery on a rich house in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, along with Silien and another accomplice Remy (Philippe Nahon). However the robbery goes wrong as the police are informed in advance. Maurice escapes with his life, albeit injured, but passes out before waking up in his friend Jean’s home miraculously rescued. It’s clear that he was betrayed and all fingers seemingly point to Silien. Would such an apparently loyal friend really double-cross him? Or are there others in Maurice’s life who aren’t all they seem?
Le Doulos divided contemporary critics, though it was especially unpopular with American reviewers. In 1964, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote that “…there’s not much to recommend the picture, which is one of those feeble attempts to be philosophical and mordant about crime as a chosen career… Endless English subtitles translate the slangy dialogue”. But the film defined the Melville outlook; a lonely, paranoid masculinity where nothing pays off.
The film’s name Le Doulos is a French slang term for the face-obscuring hat worn by criminals at the time (Credit: Alamy)
Le Doulos marked the beginning of Melville’s golden period of filmmaking during which he would make many classic films, such as Army of Shadows (1969) and The Red Circle (1970). But it’s Le Doulos that most strongly highlights Melville’s twin interests: a deep obsession with American culture and an undeniably Gallic despondency.
“Without the American cinema [of the 1930s]… I would not make films, and I would not have made Le Doulos”, he told French magazine L’Avant-scène cinema in 1963. Melville’s love of Americana was even present in his own name. Originally named Jean-Pierre Grumbach, the director changed his surname to Melville in honour of one of his American literary heroes, Herman Melville. Such an alteration was only the tip of the iceberg for Melville’s American obsessions.
In his youth, Melville would spend hours in Paris’s cinemas, traversing the boulevards in search of the latest US import, especially film noir. Similar to the upcoming generation of cinephile filmmakers like Truffaut and Godard, Melville’s filmic education took the form of obsessive trips to the cinema and provided him with enough inspiration for a lifetime. Melville loved the classic films of suave criminals walking down rainy pavements sporting trench coats. He adored John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942) and the earlier Warner Bros crime vehicles for the likes of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.
Out of his works, Le Doulos is arguably the most obvious bearer of this American influence though it was by no means the first French crime film to take inspiration from across the Atlantic. “Some earlier French crime films like [Julien Duvivier’s] Pépé le Moko and [Jacques Becker’s] Touchez pas au grisbi had shown the influence of Hollywood in terms of stylised characterisation, dialogue and costume,” Andrew suggests.
Its unconventional view of Paris
The way Melville shoots Paris, along with his characters, is heavily indebted to US noir. “My film draws on the mythology of American gangster films of the 1930s which follow a very distinct code of behaviour, like in Westerns,” he told an interviewer in 1963, referring to the deeply masculine unwritten codes of honour which are usually betrayed in such films, leading to violence. Alongside Melville borrowing the ethos of US crime cinema, Professor Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (1982), says he also borrowed the smallest of details from American films too; changing the brand of cars and bar names to more US forms. “Even more obviously,” she argues, “the traditional gangster attire of trench-coat and hat and contrasted black-and-white lighting of Le Doulos place it within the iconography of 1930s and 1940s American noir.”
The film also offers a strikingly bleak view of the French capital at the time. Though the first Parisian landmark seen in Le Doulos is the Sacré-Cœur, the camera quickly draws further and further away until finally ending in a bombed-out wasteland. Consider the romantic renditions of Paris playing that same year on the big screen such as in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim or Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7; films which shoot the city with a palpable joie de vivre even when their narratives are melancholy. Compared to the Paris of these films, Melville’s is desolate, even if still stylish to look at.
Whereas early US noir’s drama stemmed from the tough aftermath of the American Depression of the late 1920s, Melville’s found equal hopelessness in the aftermath of World War Two. Working for the French Resistance, Melville was confronted by the reality of both violence and the dangers of betrayal. The society he shows is a secretive one, working under the cover of shadowy darkness, where trust becomes a currency easily sold.
With its double-crossings and brutal finale, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs has clear echoes of Le Doulos (Credit: Alamy)
However, if Le Doulos followed in US film noir’s footsteps, there were also striking ways in which it diverged from its template – in part with its sheer intricacy. As Vincendeau puts it the “traditional clarity of action of the American cinema is challenged head-on by Le Doulos’s complex plotting, ambiguity and withholding of information, right from frame one”. Characters cannot trust each other, much to the misfortune of virtually everyone in the film. Whereas American noir would clearly reprimand its equally devious characters to highlight its moral core, Melville’s persistent ambiguity feels deeply Gallic.
Another difference between Le Doulosand the American cinema it referenced was its explicit portrayal of violence. In one infamous scene, Silien visciously beats Maurice’s girlfriend (Monique Hennessy), ties her by the neck to a radiator and throws whiskey in her face before interrogating her. The blunt, uncompromising brutality is exactly the sort that would find wider purchase in later crime films, in America and in Europe. In 1962, however, it was a bolt from the blue.
Just as Le Doulos was inspired by the US crime cinema that preceded it, the film’s distinctly visceral, hyper-tense style had an equal influence on future US crime films in return. Indeed, Melville’s heady combination of moody tropes from classic US noir and the rawer French style, which mixed equally chic mise-en-scène with hints of documentary vividness, still holds a huge sway with American directors.
Martin Scorsese, for example, has cited Le Doulos as an influence. In preparation for filming The Irishman (2019), Scorsese screened it to his own director of photography Rodrigo Prieto. “For the tone of the movie, I wanted it to be contemplative and it had to be an intimate epic,” he told fellow director Spike Lee in an on-stage discussion around its release. “So I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films. I showed Le Doulos and Le deuxième soufflé. It’s a very different world, but I like the understatement of it.”
Tarantino is another high-profile admirer. When asked by interviewer Josh Becker about the inspirations for his 1992 debut film Reservoir Dogs, he replied: “It’s like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, which is my favourite screenplay of all time, with Jean-Paul Belmondo; it’s fantastic.” Reservoir Dogs certainly borrowed Le Doulos’s style, but more specifically its finale is an echo of Melville’s, with a trio of men shooting each other dead, and all over a betrayal.
Le Doulos still stands today as one of the great crime films of the post-war years. In hindsight, it feels like a pivot point on which the crime films before and after turn, marking the genre’s transition from the melodramatic to coolly brutal. Pessimism on screen has never looked so good since; the city forever a lonely, rain-soaked place where death is waiting to collect and betrayal is always just around the corner.
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