Le doulos

Jean Pierre Melville was a brilliant and fatalistic filmmaker who hardly found any recognition by anyone in his own home country except from other filmmakers. Only abroad was he given credit as a film director of exceptional talent. For example, his turn as film director for Le Doulos(1961) exposes him as a filmmaker of three dimensional skills. In films like Le Doulos(1961), things such as expressionism become an essential part of Melville's cannon of films.

Jean Paul Belmondo is one of the most famous French tough guys besides Alain Deleon, and Yves Montond. In a way the Silen character played by the actor can be seen as Michel of Breathless(1960) if Michel had lived and became an informer. Belmondo was one of the coolest actors from French cinema for his time. The person of Silen is hard to pin down because one never knows whose side he is on.

Minor classic of French Noir especially in the 1950s-1960s. There are two reasons why I think it to be. First, the story and plot are compelling to follow. Two, many of the essences of film making is brought together to Le Doulos(1955) with some good film execution and competent screenwriting.

Some ingenious plot twists are used to keep the viewer on his or her toes. These plot twists are done in a manner that makes sense and yet retains some form of unpredicability. They are never used for the sake of using them nor are badly wasted as for instance in Wild Things(1998). The plot twists of Le Doulos(1961) are examples of what was one of many big trademarks in the French gangster picture.

Le Doulos(1961) deals with small time gangsters whose beliefs in honor and loyalty are pretty slim. In the gangster world of Melville the qualities of honor and loyalties are nearly extinct and replaced by betrayal and greed. Almost every character in Le Doulos(1961) is someone who can not be trusted and has a duel nature about them. The director never paints a romantic outlook for the criminals of Le Doulos(1961) and that's what makes it effective as a crime thriller.

Narcissism is a major motif for Le Doulos(1961) especially in the behavior of Silen. In many of Melville's main characters from films such as Le Doulos(1961) and Le Samurai(1967) there is a narcissistic feeling that compensates for the emptyness that surrounds their inner body. This is especially true for the Melville characters of Silen and Jeff whose only loyalties are to themselves. That is one element that makes Jean Pierre Melville a fatalistic filmmaker.

The acting in Le Doulos has its shares of ups and downs depending on an individual actor's performance but for the main two the acting is quite good. Jean Paul Belmondo exhibits his strength as an actor in playing the informer, Silen. Serge Reggiani as Maurice Faugel plays his character with a dogged tiredness that is reminicent of Jean Servais's performance in Rififi(1955). Contains a small co starring role for Michel Piccoli who became a major leading actor for many well known film directors including Luis Bunuel, Jean Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol.

Might be the most underrated picture of Jean Pierre Melville's gangster motion pictures. Does not get the same acclaim as the director's best..I.E., Bob Le Flambeur(1955), Le Samurai(1967), or even Le Cercle Rouge(1970). Le Doulos(1961) has many themes that Jean Pierre Melville return over and over again in his crime films. It is very good at developing tension that bursts open like a cantaloupe.

Le Doulos's direction gets some terrific visual ques from Melville as well as a tight execution of plotting. Jean Paul Belmondo was Jean Pierre Melville's second alter ego after Alain Delon which helped make them into a great actor-director combo. The Paris locations are beautifully breathtaking and fantasticly pictured on film for Le Doulos(1961). The camera and the black and white photography contributes to making the locations a main part of the action.

German film director, Volker Schlondorf first worked in films as an assistant director like Le Doulos(1961) for Jean Pierre Melville(1961)[Volker Schlondorf must have been heavily influenced by Melville when later becoming a film director himself]. The heist sequence of Le Doulos(1961) is not quite on the grandeur level of Rififi(1955) but does fine on its own in a low key way. The ending deals with redemption and the price the two character suffer for achieving their goal of redemption. Le Doulos(1961) is a French variation of John Ford's The Informer(1935) that uses different ideas and, different results, and different plot importances.

Le Doulos is a very good gangster noir from Jean-Pierre Melville. Like his other crime films its American influenced but with French style. It's really a recreation of the American film-noir of the 40's in 60's Paris. As such it's very stylised. Despite the time period, all of the actors look, act and dress like characters out of a hard-boiled movie from the 1940's. Trench coats and hats are the order of the day despite not being in the least bit in fashion in the 60's. The actors were all instructed to perform in a very controlled stylistic way that mimicked those old movies. This was seemingly something that Jean-Paul Belmondo found very unsatisfying, not surprising from an actor famed for working with Jean-Luc Godard whose style was extremely loose and off-the-cuff by comparison.

Like noir, this one has a cast of characters where none are good in the traditional sense. It's about a thief who has just been released from prison. He immediately gets involved in criminal activity but is sold out to the police. He suspects his best friend is a police informer ('le doulos'). It's about betrayals, friendship and people assuming the worst of each other; the honour/dishonour of thieves. Of course, this being a noir, things do not run in a straightforward manner and there are several twists and turns before we reach the end. Look out also for an early cinematic nude scene featuring Fabienne Dali who also made a memorable appearance as a sexy witch in Mario Bava's Gothic horror film Kill, Baby…Kill!

Described by some as an example of 'film noir' or even as an early 'neo-noir', this is the work of auteur, Jean Pierre Melville and as such less a genre work and more his very own. Unlike the American originals, largely spewed out in their dozens and at great speed and low cost, often as B pictures geared to appeal to as large an audience as possible with elements as sensational as could be got away with, this Melville picture has more lofty aims. The director was in the French resistance during the Nazi occupation during war and as he shows here is much more interested in the world of police informers and collaboration than the more classic 'noir' tropes of isolation, alienation and the temptations of the 'femme fatale'. Nevertheless there are some wonderful sequences, like the opening shot on location beneath the railway lines and we have cinematographer, Nicolas Hayer {Panique (1946) and Orphee (1950)} to thank for these because Melville, largely financing his own projects, was always working to a budget and much of his interior studio set pieces here are well below expected standards and jar horribly with the more expansive and expressionist exteriors. Being French, the film also has far too much dialogue and a few scenes in the middle and an extended one towards the end are a considerable drag on what should have been a much more snappy affair. Finally, whilst I acknowledge that there are several US 'noir' classics that have nonsensical of difficult to follow plots, this effort seems far too unnecessarily complicated for the simple tale that it ultimately is.

How I would've loved to see this movie on the big-screen; as it is, one of the only set-backs in watching it is that the current Kino VHS copy is of poor quality, with the kind of subtitles you can't read when it's with a white background, and the aspect ratio is off at times. But it is a kind of "lost" classic in some ways, harder to find than Jean-Pierre Melville's films on Criterion DVD (Le Cercle Rouge, Bob le Flabeur, and Le Samourai), but still as rich in his own style than with his other films. If at times it might not seem as much Melville as usual, it may be because it's based off a book by Pierre Lesou. But Melville still instills his distinctive flair at making old-fashioned crime stories involving criminals with codes of honor, police with some level of respect and intelligence, and a perfection of dead-pan dialog and silences.

The film also includes a star of the times- Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, a sort of smooth operator of underdog criminals, who is friends with Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani, a man with soul in his face if that makes sense). Faugel, at the start of the film, does something that may or may not have been the right thing, but he still has to hide it, in the midst of gearing up for a heist (again, this IS Melville). The heist doesn't go as planned. There's also been another murder, which Silien cannot stand, even as he is placed in the realm of a police investigation. I hesitate to describe much else of the story; on a first viewing one may think there is too much exposition at times (in particular when Silien reveals some of the details later in the film to Faugel, with fades to flashbacks and so forth), and the double-crossings that occur make the story very twisty, in the perfunctory crime-novel sense of course. In some ways it's a little more novelistic in the storytelling than a film like Le Cercle Rouge.

The style of Le Doulos is a sumptuous feast for the eyes and senses. It isn't always fast and it isn't always slow, but when Melville wants a level of suspense he somehow brings it. Like all his other crime films, he's working in a framework akin to the American genre pictures of the late 30's and 40's- tough guys almost always shielding their emotions, kind to most women but not all (there's an interrogation scene by Silien with a woman that is effective, and rather disturbing in just the set-up of the woman), and a kind of fate that is and isn't expected with the characters. One might even try and make naturalistic comparisons with the story; Faugel with his own problems, Silien with his lonely but loyal life to his few friends, the police's professionalism.

But what really catches me with Le Doulos, like the best moments in Melville's films, is how he subverts the kind of expectations of the classic style of the 40's American crime films - dark shadows in the background coming into the foreground, creeping in on the characters, and usually basic camera moments - with the 'new-wave' sensibilities. There are certain shots that are stunning, some of which elude me even after seeing the film three times. The Silien scene I mentioned is one, but also note the hand-held use as the robbers run away from the cops after the heist; the extraordinary long-take in the police investigation (you almost forget that there isn't a cut); the occasionally very unusual angles put onto characters to add a certain 'kick' to the feeling behind it.

Despite the straightforward attitude of the characters, there is emotion behind the style. Many have said Melville's films are 'cool', very 'cool', or sometimes too 'cold' for their own good. Both could be attributed. But the coolness outranks everything else; Belmondo, by the way, is so cool in this film, so unflinchingly so at times (even if in sometimes a little ineffectual), it makes his performance in Breathless seem amateurish. Coincidentally, he is more like the Bogart character here than in Godard's film. Reggiani, too, gives an excellent supporting performance, usually without having to say anything. The climax of the film, where the characters come to a head in the 'Halo', is like the icing on the cake of the film.

DOULOS: THE FINGER MAN (Jean-Pierre Melville - France/Italy 1962).

Jean-Paul Belmondo is the duplicitous Silien, underworld criminal and police informer and Serge Reggianni as the dogged villain Faugel. Belmondo, who normally is a much more outgoing actor, has to play a very distant role as a gangster, much different than the wanna-be gangster he played in "AU BOUT DE Soufflé" (1959) by Godard (I know it's not soufflé but the IMDb doesn't accept my correct spelling). That's probably why Alain Delon became Melville's first choice in his later films, because Delon naturally had a much more restrained performance.

Based on a novel from the famous série noire crime series, he made a film what he called 'my first real policier'. Perhaps there's a little too much emphasis on plot that has more than a few loopholes, as most film-noirs did, Melville's favorite inspiration for many of his films. I do think film-lovers are trying a little too hard to make this film into some kind of new forgotten masterpiece. By Melville standards, it still has quite a competent plot and does make sense but there's not really a central character like Bob in BOB LE FLAMBEUR or Jeff Costello in LE SAMOURAI to root for.

Melville very much belonged to the Parisian post-war intelligentsia who were infatuated with American literature, music and above all, film. He was an ardent film lover and reputedly saw at least five films a day for a long period of his life. In LE DOULOS his obsession with American cinema becomes apparent. They drive American cars (and the occasional cool Citroën), behave like gangsters in American crime films of the '40s and Melville loves to use newspaper headlines to heighten some of plot elements, just like Godard famously did in AU BOUT DE Soufflé. French Melville aficionado Ginette Vincendeau put it best: 'Melville was a director very much influenced by American cinema but by no means someone who made copies of American films; in fact, he was a very French filmmaker'.

I wasn't instantly captivated by this film as with LE SAMOURAI (1967), but the whole atmosphere, the ambiance, stunning camera movements and an almost perfect music score still make this a very agreeable Melville. This is cinema with style and class and a quintessential addition to the French gangster genre.

Camera Obscura --- 8/10