Le Samouraï (1967) - film review

Jef Costello is a professional hit-man who lives by his own rules and never loses - or so he believes.  Having fulfilled his contract to kill a nightclub owner, he is picked up by the police and held as their number one suspect.  Costello has foreseen this and has arranged a water-tight alibi with his mistress.  Unfortunately, one guest at the nightclub positively identifies him as the killer.  Certain that Costello is his man, the police superintendent orders that he be placed under constant surveillance after he has been released.  Meanwhile, the hit-man’s employer is anxious that he may betray him to the police and decides he must be eliminated.  Hounded by both the police and his gangster associates, Jef Costello realises that his time is fast running out.  He has one last mission to fulfil...

Perhaps the most highly regarded and best-known of all French gangster movies is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, a stylish noir thriller which gave actor Alain Delon his most iconic screen role and helped to establish the policier as one of the most important genres in French cinema for over a decade.   Melville had already made two significant gangster films -
Bob le flambeur (1955) and Le Doulos (1962), both heavily influenced by classic American film noir.  Le Samouraï would be his masterpiece of the genre, a meticulously crafted work of film art that is as compelling as it is chilling, one of cinema’s bleakest and most eloquent studies in male solitude.

The central character of Le Samouraï, a hired assassin played with exquisite cool by Alain Delon, epitomises the doomed but noble anti-hero that recurs throughout Melville’s oeuvre: the solitary outsider who adheres religiously to his own personal code of honour and who appears to be emotionally and physically divorced from the world around him.  Jef Costello isn’t so much a human being as an automaton, a machine that exists to fulfil a basic function (to kill under contract) without violating his personal code.  It is a highly romantic idealisation of the old-fashioned hoodlum - a species of humanity for whom honour is everything, as it was for the Japanese warrior class from which the film derives its enigmatic title.  Costello’s single-minded professionalism sets him on a higher moral platform than his gangster employers and the police who are doggedly pursuing him, both of whom will resort to any amount of duplicity and subterfuge to achieve their ends.  The moral equivalence of the police and the equally unscrupulous gangsters is underlined by the almost seamless intercutting between the two groups.  When the hit-man realises he has made a mistake, by allowing his personal feelings to prevent him from eliminating the one person who can identify him as a killer, he accepts the price he must pay with the same sangfroid as a samurai.  We engage with Costello because he, alone of all the characters in the film, has a nobility that demands our respect.

Le Samouraï sustains its unfaltering doomladen mood through its singularly oppressive atmosphere - the product of the director’s obsessive attention to detail and Henri Decaë’s washed out (almost monochrome) noir cinematography.  Melville’s mania for detail, coupled with the razor-sharp precision of his mise-en-scène, gives the film a cold, mechanistic feel, which is felt most keenly in the memorable suspense-laden sequence in which Jef is trailed by the police through the Paris Metro.  Decaë’s muted palette of greys and dull blue tones reinforce this impression of a world that has lost its soul - there is no colour, no joy in Jef’s world, just the endless tedious drudgery of existence.  Despite the familiar landmarks, the Paris seen in this film is not one that most of us will recognise.  Rather, it is an anonymous concrete metropolis that has had every last drop of joie de vivre bled out of it, leaving the dullest of backdrops against which law breakers and law upholders prosecute their interminable battle like clockwork toys. 

Alain Delon’s hyper-restrained performance (easily one of the actor’s best) betrays only fleeting glimpses of emotional awareness and perfectly encapsulates Melville’s notion of masculine solitude in a world that offers him no comfort or purpose.  Jef’s only companion is his constantly chirping bullfinch, who, locked up in a tiny grey cage, shares the gunman’s imprisonment and solitude with a similar resignation.  The bird’s plaintive chorus is the music of the killer’s soul, a solemn hymn to the abject futility of existence.  Le Samouraï is just that - a song of despair, a lament to a life that has absolutely no meaning or consolation.

Although the film is notionally based on a novel titled The Ronin by Joan McLeod, most of it is Melville’s own conception.  The idea for the film came to the director as a single image - a gangster lying stretched out on his bed, smoking, in a dingy little room.   Another influence was Frank Tuttle’s film noir This Gun for Hire (1942), adapted from the Graham Greene novel A Gun for Sale.  The lone hit-man of that film (played by a superb Alan Ladd whilst visibly suffering from pneumonia) provided the template for the character that Alain Delon would portray in Melville’s film. 

When Melville outlined the film to Delon at his home, the latter was curious to know what title he envisaged for it.  Delon then led him into his bedroom and, without a word, gestured to his private collection of old Japanese weaponry, which included a samurai sword and dagger.  Melville was so taken with the samurai connection that not only did he adopt this for the film’s title, but he acknowledged it in a caption at the start of the film, to the effect that: "There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle."  Melville credited the quotation to the Book of Bushido, the samurai training manual, whereas in fact he made it up.  The central character, Jef Costello, is a samurai in all but name, the silent warrior who must adhere to a sacred code of honour or else surrender his life.

Le Samouraï was not Melville’s easiest production.  The project was very nearly scuppered at the outset when a fire broke out at the director’s Paris studios, in which he narrowly escaped with his life (the original bullfinch to have appeared in the film was not so fortunate).  Melville’s insistence on casting Alain Delon’s wife Nathalie in a major supporting role (that of Jef’s prostitute mistress) resulted in serious ructions between the director and his lead actor - at the time, the couple were in the process of separating and would divorce before the film was released.  Melville had originally considered Nathalie Delon for the part of the nightclub pianist, the role which ultimately went to the stunningly beautiful Cathy Rosier.  For the part of the calculating police chief who is the main character’s nemesis, Melville cast François Périer, a highly regarded actor of stage and screen who would reprise the role (which he plays brilliantly) in a number of subsequent films policiers, notably Police Python 357 (1976).  Alain Delon took the lead role in Melville’s last two films: Le Cercle rouge (1970) and Un flic (1972), two other highly respectable entries in the gangster genre.

Le Samouraï was not only a major critical success for Jean-Pierre Melville, it was also a substantial box office hit, attracting over two million spectators in France whilst achieving comparable success abroad.  The film bolstered the international reputation of Melville and effectively created the gangster archetype that would dominate French cinema for the next decade, one that would also haunt Delon for the rest of his career.  The film also enjoys a lasting legacy, inspiring subsequent generations of filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino, John Woo and Jim Jarmusch - the latter’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is a virtual remake of Melville’s film and includes several direct references to the film.  Today, Le Samouraï is almost universally acknowledged to be one of the most perfect examples of French film noir.  It is not so much a conventional crime drama as a haunting and highly evocative study in solitude, the most absorbing and poignant of Jean-Pierre Melville’s existential cinematic poems.

© James Travers 2011

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