The French Get the American Gangster: Jean-Pierre Melville, part 1

In an earlier post about The Town (2010), I mentioned that the filmmakers studied parts of French Film Noir. I am going to explore that a bit in this post while praising some of the more obscure films.

A variation of the American gangster film lived for a while in France thanks to Jean-Pierre Melville and others. There were a number of great French film directors of the 1950s and '60s who were greatly influenced by American film noir. WWII interrupted the showing of American films for a while. After the war, a number of directors ate up the film noir component of the backlog of American cinema. Maybe it was the cheaply made nature of these films that was the allure. After all, deep shadows are a lot cheaper than actually dressing a set.

Melville seemed to take this a small step further.His films are each a distillation of a single theme. Two films of note are Le Doulos and Le Cercle Rouge. Although most film aficionados consider Le Cercle Rouge to be his masterpiece, I think Le Doulos to be a rougher, more ragged film and so much better because of that. Both films have a theme echoed in the recent The Town.

If one had to trim Le Doulos down to the its most central theme (and that is the point of this blog), it would be Bros-Before-Hoes or BB4H. That's it and it is fascinating how it is slowly revealed through the interweave of the story lines of the two main characters. Friendship and loyalty among men are above all.

The second film plays with a similar theme of the Buddy Film (Or BB4H variant), in that it postulates that sooner or later men of a similar nature will eventually cross into the same arena of the story (a red circle in this case). We have similar characters to The Town. Corey (Alain Delon) is the sophisticated criminal who is very close to Affleck's Doug MacRay. Le Commissaire Mattei (Bourvil) is the same policeman who thinks everybody is guilty as John Hamm's Special Agent Adam Frawley. In Le Cercle Rouge everybody else becomes either secondary or a useful tool to highlight aspects of the file. This is true to a point in The Town. The difference is that the Buddy Film overlay imparts a different angle to and complicates the plot a bit.