Le Doulos (1962)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

Film Review

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.

Film Synopsis

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...