Le Doulos (1962)

Le Doulos is a French thriller film first released in 1962, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.  The film is based on a novel by Pierre Lesou and stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, Serge Reggiani, Jean Desailly, René Lefèvre and Marcel Cuvelier.  It has also been released under the title: Doulos: The Finger Man.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Maurice Faugel is a career burglar who has just completed a stretch in prison.  He is preparing a house break-in with some equipment provided by a friend, Silien.  Unbeknown to him, someone has betrayed him to the police, who turn up in the course of the robbery.  Faugel manages to escape but his accomplice is killed in an exchange of gunshots in which a policeman is also killed.  Faugel is arrested and ends up back in prison.  Suspecting that Silien is a police informer, he resolves to have his revenge...

With Le Doulos, French film director Jean-Pierre Melville began his now legendary cycle of five French gangster films which paid homage to the classic American film noir thrillers of the past and which earned him his reputation as the king of the French film policier.  Melville, an obsessively keen devotee of American culture and cinema, had already made two films that were influenced by classic film noir – Bob le flambeur (1955) and Deux hommes dans Manhattan (1959) – but these he considered more as social dramas than true gangster films.  With its obvious noir trappings, murky characters and bleak existentialist undertones, Le Doulos sees Melville move into new, very distinctive territory - a stylish gangster movie revolving around issues of loyalty and deceit, recurring themes in the director’s subsequent oeuvre.

Of the five near-faultless gangster films that Melville made, between 1962 and 1972, Le Doulos is the grimmest and the most stylised.  From the stunning opening sequence, a seemingly endless tracking shot in which a solitary figure (Serge Reggiani) walks along a shadowy walkway, looking like a condemned man heading towards the scaffold, there is an all-pervasive atmosphere of doom.  The usual noir devices – confined, oddly angled sets, harshly lit in a sinister expressionistic manner – create a sense of entrapment and predestination.  These impressions grow into a harrowing certainty as the story builds towards its gripping climax.  Originating from the Série noire novel by Pierre Lesou, Le Doulos is Greek tragedy recast as a beautifully composed homage to film noir.

Whilst there is a gradual stylistic evolution across Melville’s gangster films, a slow drift away from the aesthetics of film noir towards the more naturalistic and gritty approach that was more in vogue at the time, there is an almost relentless consistency in the ideas and themes that underpin these films.  Melville’s experience of serving in the French resistance during WWII had made him particularly sensitive to the value of friendship and loyalty.  The cynical view that, ultimately, no one is dependable, that everyone has the potential to be a traitor, a collaborator, infects most of Melville’s films.  The central protagonists in a Jean-Pierre Meville gangster film are almost always ambiguous, taciturn anti-heroes with fragmented identities who do little to betray their inner thoughts and feelings.   Le Doulos is an extreme case of this, since the characters’ motivations evidently change in the course of the film, altering how we regard them and also preventing us from fully understanding them.  A moment’s reflection on the possibility that the characters are deceiving us prompts us to question where their true loyalties lie.  In these films, as in life, we can never be truly certain who we can trust.

Jean-Pierre Melville was the model auteur, self-taught and an outsider to the highly regimented and largely studio-centric method of filmmaking that was prevalent in France at the time he began making films.  A forerunner of the French New Wave, he valued his independence but was still bound by commercial constraints over which he had little control.  One of the requirements imposed on Melville by his producers (Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti) to give Le Doulos box office appeal was the casting of a big name actor.  Jean-Paul Belmondo had enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom since his appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1959) and was rapidly becoming an icon of French cinema.  Melville had employed him on Léon Morin, prêtre and was keen to work with him again.  Unfortunately, like many actors, Belmondo found Melville a very hard taskmaster, since he was required to give a restrained and controlled performance, with none of the freedom to improvise that he relished.  Belmondo and Melville reportedly had a very difficult working relationship, and yet, despite this, many regard Le Doulos as one of Belmondo’s best screen performances.  Instead of the familiar grinning action man, the actor projects a completely different screen persona – an enigmatic trench-coat-wearing hoodlum with a cool streak of vicious malignancy.

Belmondo’s is not the only great performance in this film.  Serge Reggiani brings a dark brooding presence to his gangster portrayal - Melville saw him as a descendent of the character that he had previously played in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or (1952).  Appearing briefly in the film’s beginning is René Lefèvre, an actor who was hugely popular in the 1930s, perhaps best remembered for his leading role in René Clair’s Le Million (1931).  Other names that should be familiar to French film aficionados are Jean Desailly, Michel Piccoli and, making his film debut, Philippe Nahon.

This is far more than a straight pastiche of classic film noir - it has an unmistakably French character to it.  Nicolas Hayer’s moody cinematography brings a subtly Gallic twist to the familiar film noir iconography.  Melville goes to great lengths to recast the Paris setting as New York, but his cinematographer cleverly undermines this and leaves us in no doubt that the film is set in France, the chic, vibrant France of the early 1960s.  Hayer even reuses some of the devices he had previously employed on H.G. Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), such as the swinging lamp, an appropriate allusion to man’s treacherous dual nature.

In common with much of Jean-Pierre Melville’s work, Le Doulos was criminally neglected in the decades that followed its initial release but recently it has come to be regarded as a classic of its genre and a masterpiece of French cinema.  Many gangster films were made in France in the 1960s, but few, if any, come close to matching the technical excellence and stunning visual quality of this film.  Despite its intensely pessimistic tone, ambiguous characters, outbursts of misogynism and apparent lack of a sure moral perspective, Le Doulos is a mesmerising piece of cinema - grim and chilling, and yet thoroughly compelling.

© James Travers 2010-2011


The popularity of film noir following the Second World War certainly can be attributed to French interest in American popular culture.  The genre, after all, is an American invention, the brilliant result of John Huston`s determination to bring intact to the screen (1941) Dashiell Hammett`s seamy, cynical novel The Maltese Falcon.  This required Huston`s coming up with new kind of American film - dark, worn, coolly corrupt, one that captured the murky morality, danger, viciousness and essential rootlessness close to the underbelly of American life.  American though the genre is, it claims antecedents.  Cited most often is the shadowy expressionism of silent German cinema.  However, film noir more directly descends from French poetic realism of the 1930s, which film noir is in fact a more hardboiled, practically-minded version of.  Thus in turning to noir, French cinema was really returning to itself, in an effort to reestablish French culture, which the war (and the Occupation) had interrupted.

While French film noir retained much of the harshness and
cold-bloodedness of the American, it united these qualities with some measure of poetic realism`s spirituality.  Its grounding, though, widely differs.  Whereas American film noir provides extensive commentary on greed, masculine prerogatives, misogynism and the entrenchment in the American psyche of the nineteenth-century political myth of manifest destiny, French film noir refers, naturally enough, to French experience – specifically, during the war the German occupation in the north, and the role played by the collaborationists.  Together, these national events and their aftermath of disillusionment explain  the genre`s grip on the French imagination; they are the dark night of France that, at whatever remove, the images of French noirs evoke.

No wonder.  In the ‘30s poetic realism, with its moody sense of suspended lives on the verge of doom, perfectly expressed a nation`s fatalism and despair as Germany swallowed more and more of Europe.  France felt that nothing less than her soul was at risk, and the prospect was bleak.  We may say, then, that in such great works as Marcel Carné`s Quai des brûmes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939) poetic realism looks hopelessly ahead.  In a sense French noir extends this bleak vision; but it is also the case that it looks back, to the Occupation, even as it nearly always presents, as poetic realism did, contemporary narratives that catch a tenor of the times.  French noir is a cinema of penetrating ambiguity, of confounded notions of liberty, loyalty and the law; in its domain, at whatever remove, an “underground” of rootless, subsistent and hunted criminals recalls, ironically, the Resistance, while at the same time the more posh criminals, the turncoats and the squealers, and of course the police authorities to whom they squeal, recall those who sold out France by accommodating the Germans.  To fail to grasp this momentous depth in French noir is to miss the extent to which it expresses, bleedingly, the kind of national self-criticism France is, absurdly, often adjudged to be immune to.

French noir flourished in the 1950s, when it was still deeply and painfully attached to its historical-cultural roots; but its greatest practitioner reached his artistic maturity in the 1960s.  This was Jean-Pierre Grumbach, who, adopting the surname of the greatest American novelist, had become Jean-Pierre Melville. In his twenties during the Occupation, Melville, a Parisian, found the experience unshakable.  His first film, The Silence of the Sea (1947), is directly about the Occupation, as is, fourteen years later, Leon Morin, Priest (1961).  Both these remarkable films are non-noirs.  Melville`s three great noirs are Le doulos (1962), Second Breath (1966) and his masterpiece, Le samourai (1967).  It is with the first of these films, however, that this current essay deals.

The title Le doulos translates as the finger man – in American parlance, the stoolie, or the rat.  The film is an ambiguous descent into a morally clouded world of hoodlums, cops and, treading a line between the two, informants.  In this world, people may not be what they seem, in either direction on the moral scale.  Somebody`s loyalty may prove as unexpected as somebody else`s treachery.

The story, I presume, derives from the novel by Pierre Lesou that the credits cite as the film`s source.

Since his recent release from prison, Maurice has stayed with Gilbert, his accomplice in the Mozart jewel heist.  The film begins outdoors, with Maurice ambling to Gilbert`s place.  With its liberated air, this opening recalls that of François Truffaut`s The 400 Blows (1959), especially since, again, the sense of openness and freedom is ironic--this time, deadly ironic.  For, while he walks, Maurice contemplates killing his benefactor.  The reason?  During Maurice`s incarceration Gilbert “silenced” Arlette, Maurice`s girlfriend, to insure against her defection to the police.  Maurice knows better; Arlette would never have fingered Gilbert.  And, although Gilbert has taken him in, isn`t his generosity grounded in guilt?  But – but – .   When the moment of decision arrives indoors, Maurice hesitates shooting Gilbert in the back with the man`s own gun.  But he does shoot him dead.  He had to, he explains later, because Gilbert had turned around and had seen the gun – “and you don`t point a gun at a friend.”  At the outset, then, a moral tangle creates a knot of tortuous logic, hiding, perhaps, shame and fear of reprisal.

The tangle tightens.  Thérèse, Maurice`s current girlfriend, may be as treacherous as Arlette was loyal (if indeed she would have been had she lived).  Is Thérèse also the sex partner of the policeman Salignari, and is she working for him undercover?  Maurice now has one friend: Silien.  But is this attentive friend perhaps being too attentive?  And what is to be made of the fact that Salignari is Silien`s only other friend?  Salignari is killed.  Does Silien know, as we do, that it is Maurice, during a bungled heist, who killed Salignari?  Is Silien loyal to Maurice? – or treacherous, and loyal to Salignari`s memory?  Is he now protecting Maurice, as it appears, or is this rumored police informant the very one who fingered Maurice, causing his latest incarceration?  Suspecting the worst, Maurice arranges from his cell for Silien`s execution.  Released, however, he is convinced of Silien`s devotion.  Silien reveals he dispatched Maurice`s betrayer, Thérèse.  Now Maurice tries frantically to subvert the hit he arranged.  Too late; all three men – Silien, Maurice, Silien`s assassin – pay with their lives.

Le doulos is a deeply affecting work, full of embittered sorrow and a sense of regret.  Typical of noir, its visual form, outstanding, often involves underlit interiors or some intrusion of light into utter darkness – the collision of small light and vast dark along the metaphysical line where life passes over: flashlights illuminating stretches of interior space; street lamps seemingly exhaling tenuous breath.  Nothing is quite clear, in an atmosphere of suspiciousness, betrayal and ever possible betrayal: an evocation of the Occupation, to be sure, but also a description of its legacy: France, coping with her memory.

Befitting a film descended from poetic realism – recall the ringing clock that outlasts François in Le jour se lève? – Le doulos shivers with symbolism.  The principal one is Silien`s hat.  For the longest time it seems inseparable from him, an extension of him that – I can`t resist the pun – encapsulates his toughness, privacy, secrecy, unknowableness, even indominability.  Well into the film, at the gangster-owned night spot the Cotton Club (an American reference to match the earlier, funnier French one, the Mozart jewel heist), Silien doffs his chapeau for the first time that we see.  (Ominously, the check number he is given is 13.)  This transforms him.  He appears exposed, boyish, vulnerable.  Now we`re convinced of his innocence; somebody else must have fingered Maurice.  The film`s last shot is of the empty hat.  A true, brave, unselfish man, whom we thought a monster once, diminishes yet ennobles us in his passing – the tragedy of goodness in a fallen world.

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien.  (One year earlier he was superb for Melville as Léon Morin, a young priest involved in the Resistance.)  His is a piercing performance, of such beauty and resilience as to justify both his own name and that of his character.

© Dennis Grunes 2002

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