Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) - film review

After a five year stretch in jail, an ageing crook, Monsieur Charles, decides to execute one last great robbery to pay for a comfortable retirement in Australia.  He enlists the help of a younger man, Francis, whom he met in jail, to rob the casino at Palm Beach in Cannes.  After meticulous preparations, they manage to lay their hands on 10 million francs.   But just when they are so near to making a discrete exit with their ill-gotten gains, it all goes horribly wrong...

Mélodie en sous-sol was the first in a series of stylish big budget crime-thrillers directed by Henri Verneuil who, at the time, was well-regarded for his popular comedies and melodramas, many of which featured such star performers as Fernandel and Jean Gabin.   Based on the pulp fiction novel The Big Grab by the American crime writer John Trinian, it is the classic heist movie and bears some striking similarities with two other French films of the genre that had been made in the previous decade - Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1955).  All three film are prime examples of French film noir, differing from their American counterpart in their modernist touches - extravagant tracking shots, elegant locations (which reek of wealth and decadence) and a ubiquitous jazz score.  Mélodie en sous-sol is far less action-oriented than Verneuil’s subsequent gangster/policier films and plot-wise has little to distinguish it from all the other caper movies.  However, it is a seductively stylish production which has become a classic on account of its legendary pairing of cinema icons Alain Delon and Jean Gabin.

Interestingly, Jean-Louis Trintignant was originally slated for the part of the younger crook, Francis.  When he learned about the film, Alain Delon persuaded producer Jacques Bar to give him the role, and even agreed to waiver his fee in exchange for a percentage of the profits in three countries - China, Japan and the USSR.  (As the film proved to be a major hit in Japan, Delon ended up earning ten times more than Gabin.)  By this stage in his career, Delon was already an internationally recognised star and was fast becoming one of the biggest screen actors in French cinema.  He had already worked with some of the great Italian cineastes - Luchino Visconti on Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Michelangelo Antonioni on L’Eclisse (1962) - but hadn’t yet established the chilling screen persona that would make him a cinema legend.  Mélodie en sous-sol was an important stepping stone between the French films that had brought Delon to the public’s attention -  notably René Clément’s Plein soleil (1960) - and the hard-boiled gangster films of the late ’60s and 1970s, films such as Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Jacques Deray’s Borsalino (1970).

If Delon was still finding his feet, the same was certainly not true of Jean Gabin.  The latter was safely ensconced as a cinema icon and massive mainstream cinema attraction, now as comfortable playing taciturn gangsters and ruthless patriarchs as he had been with heroic romantic roles in his early career.  Gabin also featured in a number of popular comedies, one of which he had only just made with Verneuil - Un singe en hiver (1962) - starring opposite another young actor who would come to rival Delon in popularity, Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Gabin and Delon are evenly matched in both talent and charisma but make a striking contrast.  Gabin is like a rock - solid, implacable, but with a genteel elegance.  Delon, by contrast, is like a wild panther - virile, sleak and deadly.  Whilst Delon exudes menace through his vitality and physicality, Gabin does so with virtually no effort at all, through his physical presence alone.  It is interesting that, in the course of his career, Alain Delon’s screen persona would evolve to resemble that of Gabin in his later gangster roles - colder, more controlled, a shard of twisted humanity within a granite shell.  Gabin and Delon would work together on two subsequent films: Henri Verneuil’s Le Clan des Siciliens (1969) and José Giovanni’s Deux hommes dans la ville (1973).

Mélodie en sous-sol was adapted by Albert Simonin and Michel Audiard, two of French cinema’s best-known screenwriters of this era.  Audiard actually had very little input into the script, but contributed some of the film’s most memorable dialogue exchanges.   Another strength of the film is Michel Magne’s evocative jazz score, which not only helps to build the tension but also gives it its modernist feel, perfectly complementing the fluid camerawork and stylish mise-en-scène.  Magne had an extraordinary career and many of his film scores are works of art in their own right, including his haunting theme for the Angélique films of the late 1960s.  Magne’s score for Mélodie en sous-sol is one of his richest and classiest, offering echoes of Elmer Bernstein’s music for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955).  With such a wealth of artistic input on both sides of the camera, it is not hard to see why Mélodie en sous-sol is one of Henri Verneuil’s most popular films and an enduring classic of the gangster thriller genre.  Is there a caper movie with a more inspired ending than this one?

© James Travers 2011

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