Writer and lecturer Geoff Andrew curated a season at the BFI in 2017 dedicated to the director and his unique position in French cinema. Notable for its cold, masculine urbanity and stark violence, Melville's crime cinema was both thrilling and existentialist. 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. 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. 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. The secret of his success? This idiosyncratic mix of US influence and Gallic style which lends his films an air of slick brutality.Īs 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 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. 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. – Hitchcock's most controversial thrillerĬrime cinema in France is synonymous with the enigmatic Melville. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() According to writer Raymond Chandler, a story involving crime "must be about real people in a real world".
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