Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, he had been a fighter in the French resistance he kept his codename “Melville” (in homage to Herman Melville) in professional life after the war, and never forgot a simple, brutal lesson about his countrymen: it was the rebels, the outlaws, the tough guys and the subversives who were temperamentally suited to be soldiers of the resistance. Melville’s attitude to lawlessness was crucially created by the second world war. He gave you the tough guy with the gun and the girl – the two things that Godard said you needed to make a film.īut it was more than that. Melville was the epitome of a certain type of style worshipper. It is no accident that one of his most famous on-screen acting appearances is as Parvulesco, the fictional writer being interviewed in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Well into the 50s, 60s and 70s, Melville kept creating criminals and cops in snap-brim hats and trench coats, long after it was realistically plausible to do so, until it became an almost surreal mannerism. Melville is celebrated as a poet of lowlife crime and a master of style, the creator of a Gallicised American tough-guy aesthetic taken from the 1930s Hollywood gangster movies that he adored. It is as if they are both alive, or both dead. Melville cuts to Delon’s own gaze looking back into hers. She doesn’t look like a corpse, but like an actress keeping perfectly still and directing her calm gaze into the camera lens. Then he gives us the victim’s face in startling profile, and then in closeup straight into her eyes. Melville doesn’t show us the body at first, giving us the procedural business of this cop tersely talking to the receptionist and other uniformed police. One of his eeriest scenes comes from his very last picture, Un Flicĭelon plays an officer called to a crime scene: the hotel room of a young woman who has been murdered. It often creates an almost Beckettian severity and sparseness. There is a samuraiĬode of blankness or emotional paralysis in many of Melville’s men, as if human emotions are an undisciplined expenditure of effort that should be conserved for the imminent kill. His most famous picture is probably is the hitman study Le Samouraï (1967), with the exquisitely beautiful Alain Delon as the professional assassin, a man of mandarin detachment. ![]() There are men in trench coats and hats and loosened ties, men bunched into cars on the way to or from a job gazing blankly straight ahead, men in nightclubs, their professionally bored expressions unaffected or even petrified more intensely by the drink, the cigarettes and the sexy dancers up on stage grinding through some quaintly choreographed routine (a classic Melville scene this, used in almost every one of his films). They exist in a macho world where codes of dress and behaviour are hardly different on either side of the law. Watching the movies of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose centenary is this year, is about watching the faces of men: impassive, immovable, inscrutable.
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