O Samurai

This film starts off with the same sound like Sergio Leone's 'C'era un volta il west', but it's just that here the sound is made not by a plate, but a canary, the cold-blooded killer's canary.

This film was made in 1967, the French nouveau vague already apparent all over the place, but with much more subtle undertones than, say, a work by Truffaut.

No, Melville's films were old-school, but at the same time revolutionary, in a delicate way. Take for example the 'chase' scene through the Metro. Practically nothing happens: there are no gunfights, no combat sequences, perhaps just a small chase. But it is Melville's camera and Delon's inimitable performance that keep the audience mesmerized all the way.

The camera practically flirts with the audience throughout the whole movie, picking the most interesting angles and achieving so much practically without any effort. Delon's character changes his expression only once or twice during the movie, shoots faster than even Leone's gunslingers and never forgets to feed his canary. To me, one of the most accomplished antiheroes of the whole genre.

The dialogue is barely there, but when it is, then it's something you'd probably wish you would have come up with yourself. It is a minimalist work that achieves the absolute maximum. Simply put: one of the best crime noirs ever made.

I found "Le Samourai" (**) to be more about style than substance. The pace is slow, the frustratingly enigmatic plot raises more questions than it answers (for starters, why does the hitman allow himself to be arrested and put in a police lineup after he's performed a very public shooting in the nightclub?). The title is just typical French neo-noir pretentiousness. The quotation from the Bushido is fictional and the attempt to forge a connection between a gangland hitman and a Japanese samourai is tenuous at best. I rewound this tape and watched certain key scenes again just to see if I could make any more sense of the at times nonsensical story (I couldn't). Many scenes seem to be mindless padding (e.g., the police take up 5 minutes of running time just bugging the killer's room with an absurdly conspicuous listening device that seems to be designed to be found in about two minutes). All-in-all, borrrring!

Jean-Pierre Melville took the idea of the lone gunman (perhaps more akin to the western genre than the crime genre), and created a film with star Alain Delon as a ultra-calm, smooth-operating contract killer Jeff Costello in Paris, who may be at least a little insane. The result is a blend of stylistic and thematic excellence, a suspense film where sometimes that aspect has to take a backseat to the psychological drama of the killer, and the side-story of the police procedural (headed by 'Superintendant' played by Francois Perier). The film carries very little dialog with a couple of exceptions, which gives Melville a chance to perfect his storytelling technique. Deleon, as well, was a very fit choice for the role of Costello. It's actually fascinating that Melville made this character, mostly a night owl with a look that's usually cold and hard boiled like some neo-hood from the 30's, the protagonist.

There's also the look of the film, provided in part by Henri Decae, who would later lens Melville's epic Le Cercle Rouge. In the opening shot, were given the feeling of distortion on Costello's uniquely blank one-room apartment. Is this to bring us inside of Costello's frayed consciousness, or is it just one of those style moves done by directors in the 60's? I might go for the psychological part, but what I noticed about Le Samourai, adding to the appeal of it, was the theme of Costello's mind-set is put forth subtlety. This is a pro put into tight circumstances (getting heat from his employers as well as the police), so who is there for him to go to? Just an on & off again girlfriend (Nathalie Delon), a little bird in his apartment, and a witness to one of his contracts (the late Cathy Rosier, in a performance of some note despite the one-sidedness of her part). When the action comes, it's not as bloody as in the films it later inspired (most obvious of which are John Woo's The Killer and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog), yet that too just adds on to the emotions provoked by the settings and the mis-en-scene.

So, would I recommend Le Samourai to fans of crime films? Well, it may not to those who sole obsession are the crime films that pack all the high octane juice and gore, such as in a John Woo or Hong-Kong action film, or to the Tarantino fans that may not appreciate the patience Melville has (the deliberate pace and silences) as opposed to laughs and ultra-violence. I'd guess that Le Samourai is most successful, and why it is one of the best films I will ever see, because it is heavy on the nuance and detail, doesn't skimp on keeping the genre characters believable, and leaves the gun-play as true surprises even on repeat viewings (however, this is the kind of film to be watched maybe once every year or once ever few years, so that it keeps fresh when seen again).

Aside from delivering the goods in terms of the story and as a drama, for the audience it seeks out it's highly absorbing and an example of subtlety in cinematic grammar. It's not a crime or police movie for the mainstream (and I'm sure some will seek this out from the under-ground buzz, start watching and say, "oh man, this stuff's in subtitles? I can't bear to watch"). Really, it's appeal will hold more to fans of the french new-wave, which Melville set off with Bob le Flambeur, film-geeks, and for those looking for a dosage of atmosphere and cool bravura directors can't seem to latch onto in recent times. For me, it is one of the truly sublime time-capsule of what the gangster/noir genre/mood can produce.

Melville's masterpiece about a contract killer, a modern day samuraï. He makes brilliant use of the city he loved so much, Paris. The feel, the sounds, the streets, the noise, it's all hauntingly cold and distant but at the same time he makes Paris seem like the coolest city in the world.

In the beginning of the film Melville uses a beautiful static shot of over 4 minutes to establish the audience with a seemingly empty room, then we see smoke circling upwards. There must be someone in the room but it's practically impossible to determine where the smoke is coming from. Finally Jeff Costello gets up from his bed, which wasn't recognizable as such in the first place, and appears on screen. The whole set-up is more reminiscent of a moving replica of a painting by the surrealist Paul Delvaux than anything else in modern cinema. Another surreal set piece is when after his first hit, all possible suspects are brought in at a police station, including Delon himself. Not one by one but all of 'em at the same time. In the next scene we see at least a hundred "gangsters", all wearing trench coats and hats, in a large hall, where they will be interrogated "en plein public". Genuinely strange procedures but handled with such care and stylishness that it becomes completely believable. It gives the somewhat humorous suggestion that the streets of Paris are populated by hundreds, even thousands, of trenchcoat-wearing gangsters, all loners, only seeing each other at card games and occasions like this.

Alain Delon is the perfect embodiment of gangster coolness in this career-defining role as a hit-man in Paris, a modern-day samuraï. "Le Gangster", as the French lovingly call them. Off course, these gangsters don't exist anymore and they probably never existed at all. French Gangsters must have been redefining their look after seeing Delon in this film. His association in real life with French criminal circles, in particular the Marseille underworld, has always given his performances a very strange aura.

As a kid, I regularly visited my grandmother who lived near the city of Marseille and on French television I saw lots of French gangster movies (well, my parents let me watch with them). Alain Delon was in quite a few of them. When I grew older and could identify most of the French screen legends, Delon as no other came to represent the ultimate gangster. An stylized icon of urban cool. I'm also convinced that his character Jef Costello in Le Samouraï was the inspiration for the hissing and whispering fellow in the trench coat in Sesame Street (did he have a name?), something like a gangster, a criminal. A mysterious strange man you should avoid as a kid. I'll be damned if I'm wrong, but I still see Alain Delon in Sesame Street!

For once, a bad guy who really acts like a bad guy should! This hit-man is one cold, non-descript and calculating man who plans and executes his hit with the utmost precision. About the only character I remember who did a more thorough job was the hit-man in Day of the Jackal. The police also seem very bright and competent--and repeatedly nearly trip up the baddie (Jef). Because of all this realism, I strongly commend this movie. On top of the realism, I really liked the ending. All in all, a fine film and there are no negatives that I can think of--except that this type of film is probably NOT everyone's cup of tea, so to speak. There really isn't any romance and no one is particularly likable, but what do you expect in a film like this?