JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE retrospective

[Chris Knipp]

A retrospective of Jean-Pierre Melville.

................ June 8–August 12, 2017


Illustration by Malika Favre [New Yorker]

Melville 100

There was a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective at Film Forum earlier this month (April 28 - May 11, 2017). It's being repeated at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley June 8–August 12, 2017. [The PFA/BAM program is thanks to Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum; Eric di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures; Amélie Gavin-Davet, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; the Consulate General of France, San Francisco; and Institut Français, Paris.]

Père of the Nouvelle Vague, interpreter of Cocteau, master of the crime/gangster genre, Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) remained always separate and himself. After serving in the French army and then the Resistance during WWII (when J-P Grumbach took his favorite author’s name for his own nom de guerre), he redefined "independent" with his self-financed outside-the-industry adaptations, moving gradually to those austere, if star-studded, evocations of a fantasy underworld that his surname evokes. [Film Forum]

Anthony Lane provided an introduction in The New Yorker. Prepare this way, he said:

This is how you should attend the forthcoming retrospective of Jean-Pierre Melville movies at Film Forum: Tell nobody what you are doing. Even your loved ones—especially your loved ones—must be kept in the dark. If it comes to a choice between smoking and talking, smoke. Dress well but without ostentation. Wear a raincoat, buttoned and belted, regardless of whether there is rain. Any revolver should be kept, until you need it, in the pocket of the coat. Finally, before you leave home, put your hat on. If you don’t have a hat, you can’t go.[The New Yorker]

Film buffs ought to know most of the following. I'm going to provide a few reminders and fill in some gaps or dust off some shelves.

Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï and Un Flic long ago entered at least my noir canon. Léon Morin, Priest and The Army of Shadows are justifiably considered classics by historians, and Le deuxième soufle and The Red Circle seem to be highly regarded and have been copied. Le Silence de la Mer, by the war writer Vercors and about a wordless resistance to German occupation, and Les Enfants Terrible by Cocteau have special political and literary significance, respectively, for the French. In short, he's one of the great ones. A lasting influence and one of the masters of the cool.

Many are available online or in excellent remastered or Criterion editions. But Magnet of Doom, while on DVD in France, doesn't seem to be ready at hand in the US. Too bad, since it's from a novel by Simenon, stars Belmondo, and was shot by Henri Decaë. Which kind of says it all. Quintessential Melville: the doomed, lithe hit man (Delon, a master of mime, as we learn in Le Samouraï); or Lino Ventura as the stony soldier of Resistance in Army of Shadows; or Belmondo as the enigmatic crook in Le Doulos; the young priest Léon Morin.

1917 (Paris, France) - 1973 (Paris, France)
1946 24 heures de la vie d'un clown (Short)*
1949 Le Silence de la Mer
1950 Les Enfants Terribles
1953 When You Read This Letter*
1956 Bob le Flambeur
1959 Deux hommes dans Manhattan/Two Men in Manhattan
1961 Léon Morin, prêtre/Léon Morin, Priest
1963 Le Doulos
1963 L'aîné des Ferchaux/Magnet of Doom*
1966 Le Deuxieme Souffle
1969 L'armée des ombres/Army of Shadows
1967 Le Samouraï/The Samourai
1970 Le Cercle Rouge/The Red Circle
1972 Un Flic/Dirty Money
*Hard to find in the US. Letter will be shown in the retrospective.


Alain Delon in Le Samouraï

[Chris Knipp]

1949 Le Silence de la Mer



Conscientious objectors

Le Silence de la Mer, Melville's first feature, is based on a text written by Vercors. It's a haunting story even if this seems somewhat a false start. Vercors is the pseudonym of illustrator, writer, and resistance fighter Jean Bruller, who co-founded the publishing house Éditions de Minuit. Like Vercors, who took the name from a region he was in during the war, Melville himself fought in the Resistance and took a pseudonym, as a filmmaker. His given name was Jean-Pierre Grumbach. Vercors' text was first published clandestinely in 1941 under the Occupation (translated into English by Cyril Connolly, author of The Unquiet Grave).

The short novel recounts the silent "resistance" of an elderly man and his young niece forced to house a German officer for six months. The officer is a former composer, a knowledgeable admirer of French culture and literature, fluent in French. No matter. Vercors' point is, a German must be resisted on principle, no matter how pleasing his facade. Since he's so well-meaning, one may feel a little sorry for him, both for his relentlessly chilly treatment by the man and his niece, who meet him with "the silence of the sea," never once addressing a word to him - and for his cruel disillusionment toward the end. Half the French audience in the thick of the Occupation found a "nice" Nazi an unacceptable idea. But Vercors' conception is subtle and insidious. It's a thought-provoking work.

Readers from the start noted the text's "theatrical" quality, so staging it for a film comes naturally. Nonetheless it feels static this way, despite the "opening up" scenes. It might work better as a stage play. Melville's staging feels stiff. Jean-Marie Robain, playing the uncle, was only 36, and his fake white hair looks self-evidently stagey. Some things are better read (or heard) than seen. Vercors' text works best, for me, in the audio tape version my French prof gave me, which has a kind of lulling, haunting quality as the listener takes in the "nice" and so very cultured officer's long useless effort, in meticulously correct French, to woo his forced hosts - and then, after his trip to Paris, his disillusionment when he has realized his dream of cultural union was a fantasy. What he learns in Paris is that the Nazis plan to destroy France, not merge with her; and, unwilling to see the French civilization he has so loved wrecked by his own countrymen, he chooses to go off to "Hell," the Russian front, and to die.

Le Silence de la Mer isn't a triumphant beginning, but it's a statement, one step away from the War that had dominated everything and whose suspicions, asceticism, and gloom (as well as nighttime amusements) continued to set Melville's style. It's a reminder of the War and of Resistance and a unique piece, if a somewhat one-note one, yet in its way haunting and memorable.

Melville 100 Berkeley
Sunday, June 11 - 7 PM (106 mins) BAM/PFA

[Chris Knipp]

1950 Les Enfants Terribles



Cocteau's iconic inbred siblings

Jean Cocteau liked Melville's Silence de la mer and asked him to film his short novel published by Grasset in 1929. It was written when he was on a cure for opium addiction. It blends personal mythology, including his admiration for the "Poète maudit" Raymond Radiguet and schoolboy crushes, with Greek mythology. It obviously plays with incest, focusing on a brother and sister who live together shut in a room.

Action starts with the crowded, disorderly atmosphere of a lycée with boys' crushes on boys. Gérard loves Paul (Edouard Dermithe), who loves Dargelos, the latter a kind of legendary bad boy whose original Cocteau fantasized about all his life. In winter, in a snowball fight, Dargelos throws a snowball (with a stone in it) at Paul's chest, and he collapses. Gérard takes him home, where he stays, abandoning his studies, living with his sister Elizabeth. Nicole Stéphane (née Nicole de Rothschild), who played the niece in Le silence de la mer, is Elizabeth but here, like her brother, is blonde. She grows jealous when Paul falls for Agathe, a girl brought in by Gérard. Gérard and Agathe fall under a kind of sickly, evil spell in the claustrophobic but strangely attractive - defiant, antisocial - hothouse atmosphere of the room occupied by Paul and Elizabeth, whose life is a succession of idiosyncratic personal games. The defiant unnaturalness of this world, and its incestuous jealousies, with a misaddressed love letter, leads toward tragedy.

Things happen. They go on a trip to the seaside with Gérard and his father. Their mother dies. Elizabeth gets a job as a model and brings a colleague, Agathe. Agathe resembles Dargelos strikingly (both were played by Renée Cosima). So of course Paul falls for Agathe - and the jealousy begins. Elizabeth marries Michael, rich American Jew (Melvyn Martin, who sings his own song, "Were you smiling at me"), who dies, and leaves them his big house.

Despite Melville's refusal to yield control of the direction, this film is perhaps more Cocteau's than Melville's, and of course Cocteau was a filmmaker himself who had already made his idiosyncratic surreal masterpieces Blood of a Poet and Beauty and the Beast. Cocteau was responsible for casting the much too old Dermithe in the role of Paul, who's only 14 when he's wounded by Dargelos, in the book. Truffaut admired this film, claiming it was Melville's best (an idea unique to him), and imitated its use of classical music and elegant voiceover (here, by Cocteau himself).

The atmosphere Cocteau creates, staged and filmed by Melville, is cloying and artificial. Like its predecessor, this film has value as a unique literary adaptation, but it may be for most of us an alienating work that has nothing in common with the rest of Melville. But it's powerful and original in its way, and remains so. Cocteau's story may awaken memories we have of the incestuousness of family life, or the temptation we may sometimes have of retreating into our own world.

Melville 100 Berkeley
Sunday, June 18, 2017 - 7 PM (105 mins) BAM/PFA

[Chris Knipp]

1956 Bob le Flambeur


Roger Duchesne in the raincoat as Bob Montagné ("Bob le flambeur")*

The good thief

This shows Melville at last in gangster mode, and Bob (Roger Duchesne), the "flambeur," or passionate, lavish gambler, is also charismatic crook (he has done some jail time decades ago for a failed heist) whose innate class, elegance, and decency, along with his weaknesses, engender the viewer's sympathy.

This is "film noir," alright: Bob Montagné lives in the "noir," Paris by night, in clubs and gambling dens; contrasty black-and-white photography is essential to this look. As the film opens he's returning, nicely dressed as always, to his nice flat in Montmartre, with its huge widown looking out on after a long night of gambling and making the rounds. He's well liked, even by a Inspector Ledru, a local cop whose life he once saved. As his nickname "Flambeur" implies, Bob's a high roller who burns up money with his gambling. He seems well off, but he keeps losing, and major losses are going to lead him to plan with some old confederates a raid on the Deauville casino, rumored to have lavish stores of cash on hand after the big races. He draws various collaborators into his planned operation, including his sporty but foolish young protégé, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy). He has a young woman he's just rescued off the street more or less, who lives in, most of the time, Anne (Isabelle Corey). She runs off with Paolo, whose desire to impress her will lead to fatal bragging.

There is a gentle wishfulness and a touch of class about Bob and all he does. He's a Good Crook, an amiable loser with style. Lucky for him he has a good friend, because he once saved his life, in a top cop, the cigarette-puffing Commissaire Ledru (Guy Decomble). Despite getting generous funding from a rich British crook called McKimmie (Howard Vernon), an insider with technical details, and a safe-cracking expert, due to several leks Bob's big robbery project will fail- but not brutally. The ironic twist is that at the Deauville casino, while waiting for the operation to begin, he gambles, and begins, for the first time in his life, winning enormous amounts of money. These winnings almost make him forget the heist altogether. If only he could have done, it would have gone so much better for him. But as he's cuffed and taken off, out come uniformed employees, looking like old-fashioned bellhops, carrying stacks and stacks of big old franc notes and as he and the friendly Ledru joke, with an expensive enough lawyer he can get a much reduced sentence. With a very, very expensive one, he may sue for damages!

Back in the day, this movie seemed to be on hand in many West Coast video stores. It was properly reissued in the US by Rialto 2001, and did well with the critics (Metacritic 80; Rotton Tomatoes 96). Bob le flambeur influenced the two versions of the American film Ocean's Eleven (1960 and 2001) as well as Paul Thomas Anderson's debut film Hard Eight, and was remade by Neil Jordan as The Good Thief in 2002 (Wikipedia, "Bob le flambeur"). It may remind you also in some ways of Jules Dassin's heavily process-oriented Rififi.

Bob le flambeur is best watched on your VCR, late at night, while sipping whisky. It is not a masterpiece, but it is a piece of style. It's mood is cheerful and bemused. Featuring Bob's big creamy new Chrysler convertible, it already reflects Melville's love of all things American that was to come out further in his next picture, Deux hommes dans Manhattan/Two Men in Manhattan, in which he himself costarred, and which finally became available to Yanks in 2013. (See below.)

*This still with its garish walls strongly reminds me of the photography of William Klein, who liked garish, contrasty backgrounds, as in the image below, one of his best known.

Photo by William Klein

Melville 100 Berkeley
Saturday, June 24 - 6:30 PM (98 mins) BAM/PFA

[Chris Knipp]

1959 Deux hommes dans Manhattan/Two Men in Manhattan


Delmas and Moreau pace along Broadway

Covering for a lothario

In this film Melville took a beating at the box office. He noted the mistakes he'd made in it, which he vowed never to repeat. Number one was having two main characters "se balader," wandering around a city more or less at random. Mind you, Two Men in Manhattan, which we haven't been able to see till recently (2013; you can watch it on Amazon now) is full of lovely noir images of the Big Apple at Christmas. But it lacks energy and atmosphere . To begin with, it is not a story of crime but of scandal and of moral issues of the press. Melville roams NYC in signature bow tie, checked overcoat, and hat, as Moreau, a French journalist working for Agence France Presse, sent by his boss to look for the French delegate to the United Nations, who has disappeared. With him is a tippling and cynical French photographer, Delmas (Pierre Grasset).

At first the pair go round visiting ladies associated with Fevre-Berthier, the delegate. He is married with a grown daughter, but he has had a string of mistresses, all pretty, mostly blonde, showgirls, actresses, or something more x-rated. Chosen for looks, they're not always the best thespians. One is seen topless - Delmas snaps her twice with his eternal flash camera, and she has sensational breasts. One of the ladies encountered, by the way, turns out to be lesbian. One is an excellent jazz singer, and we see her sing a whole song - about Manhattan.

The early section is like a tour by night, starting with the Upper East Side; midtown, Radio City (and the glittering Christmas tree); Greenwich Village; even Brooklyn where the tough club receives the "Frenchies" roughtly. The jazz and show tune background music is a bit relentless. Henri Decaë's images are superb, and we enjoy period shots of Times Square, a diner, early morning in a jazz club. The visuals are classic, brilliant in the restored print. But the action is a bit pedestrian. There's not much excitement. It's just one dead lead after another.

The pulse rate goes up, though, when a radio news report leads the pair back to one of the girl, an actress, Miss Nelson (Ginger Hall) - in the hospital, after a suicide attempt. They sneak into her room, and learn Feevre-Berthier lies dead at her flat, from "a coronary, or something." Delmas steals her keys and they go to the flat. Even though the cause of death is nothing homicidal things become more exciting when a corpse appears - and the two newsmen start fighting over what to do. Moreau wants to protect the man's honor and his widow's peace of mind. Delmas is all for posing a racier shot, and selling the story to Life for thousands. He rushes off, with Moreau in hot pursuit, in the rather vain effort to stop him from developing his film. A surprise comes from the dead man's daughter, and another one from Delmas himself in the final scene, featuring him alone, after a final drink at a music bar called the Pike Slip Inn on a deserted street - a perfect place to end. If only the action had been more twisted and suspenseful.

At home in Paris Melville famously drove a Cadillac and wore a cowboy hat. This movie is a homage to the actual New York that clearly inspired him. It can't compete with his great gangster films set in France. But its cinematography is iconic and it's fun to observe Melville's rapid-fire, deadpan delivery as an actor. We can see how both show their influence on his more famous French-located noir films. But for all his enthusiasm, he is not in his element here - nor, needless to say, has he the charisma of Belmondo or the glamour of Delon! This is a minor peripheral noir, but with an album of memorable French nighttime postcards of New York.


The late night jazz club, the Pike Slip Inn


Vintage image of Times Square

Melville 100 Berkeley
Sunday, July 30 - 7 PM (84 mins) BAM/PFA

[Chris Knipp]

1961 Léon Morin, prêtre/Léon Morin, Priest


Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Léon Morin, Priest

One's own private war

This begins a beneficial collaboration with the young and charismatic Jean-Pierre Belmondo, who had popped off the screen in Godard's debut Breathless, which made him famous. It's quite a shift for the actor from the young hoodlum to the priest. He makes a great priest, young, sexy, muscular, and chaste at the same time. It is one of his most memorable roles. What a costar he has: Emmanuelle Riva of Hiroshima mon amour (and recently of Haneke's Amour). And after the "cassage de guelle" Melville declared he took with his misfired Two Men in Manhattan, with its thin story and meandering action, it's got plenty of rich complex elements: politics and love, passionate religious debate and the intensity of wartime danger and the horrors of the Occupation. Melville, a veteran of the army and of the Resistance, had been preparing to make it for years and searching for a suitable Léon Morin, whom he found when he met Belmondo. Still, the subject might seem old-fashioned and static with all its theological debating, but by casting Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Paul Riva, associated with the exciting New Wave, Melville set the stage to transform the material into something exciting and sexy.

Jean-Pierre Melville, by the way, had appeared in Breathless as the novelist in the press conference asked by Jean Seberg for his greatest ambition in life, who replies, "Devenir immortel, et puis. . . morir," "To become immortal, and then to die." (You can watch the scene on YouTube here.)

In this film Melville is adapting the frankly autobiographical Fifties novel by Béatrix (or Béatrice) Beck, which won France's highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Melville thought it was the best picture of the time, the German occupation, that humiliating period, and of the French Resistance. In its core also the book was hot stuff, and the film, a decade later, was hot stuff too: it presents the forbidden love of a communist woman and a chaste priest who engage in intense intellectual and religious debates in a village in the French Alps in the tough time of the German occupation. Melville used location shooting and the lively methods of his dp Henri Decaeë, who he discovered with his first film and had become a key Nouvelle Vague cinematographer. This was also the first time Melville had a large budget enabling him to make good use of studio filmmaking possibilities so he could merge his personal style with more mainstream technique, and the film was a huge commercial success and a critical success in France.

Melville downplayed the Jewish and resistance content of the story in his final edit, though there are many little specific details of the time. He had originally used the book to craft "a great fresco of the Occupation." But, Melville explained later, "suddenly, the only aspect that continued to interest me was this story of an unfulfilled love affair between Morin and Barny," and he cut an hour out of the film and focused what was left on that. It was a wise decision that makes this an emotionally powerful and universal film. It draws on Melville's economy and austerity of style, the brutal efficiency of his crime films, but applies them to intellectual debate and affairs of the human heart.

Barny (Riva), a Communist, starts the religious debates with Léon Morin as a lark. She has a half-Jewish child, and like others, gets her baptized to protect her from discovery by the Nazis. This leads her to declare her rationalism, and decide to discuss religion with the local priest, first approaching him challengingly in the confessional. He disarms her by agreeing to her objections and showing sympathy to her social ideas: he himself is one of the people and aware of social needs. He challenges her to further discussion. Then he gives her books, and she becomes excited - both by the debate, and by him. And the discussions go on. She is wrestling with her bitterness as a war widow, with all the feelings of the war and occupation, and with her growing attraction both to the priest and to the idea he makes attractive too, of a Catholic God.

There's a marvelous tension between the roles of Riva and Belmondo here and what the public then knew them for, the bold hoodlum Belmondo of Breathless and Riva the actress of Hiroshima mon amour who has an affair with a Japanese man and remembers a forbidden affair with a German in rural France in the War. For Barny, Léon Morin is a forbidden love. It becomes clear when we see her erotic dream. She asks him if he were a Protestant priest, if he would marry her. In the novel he says yes, but here he says nothing, only smashes down a hatchet on a wood block, showing he is aware of her attraction. We can appreciate this film without being Catholic as Melville could make it so brilliantly, though an atheist Jew. Now, times are very different. But the film holds up as a powerful and unusual love story that still grabs you. It's a work of technical mastery and a living classic.

It also looks great in the Criterion Collection edition, which includes selected scene commentary by a French film historian, Ginette Vincendeau, that clarifies the whole context of the film's creation. Riva is touching and beautiful, and Belmondo still astonishes with his delicate mixture of machismo and sensitivity. If one can't understand Barny's spiritual confusion, one can certainly feel her emotional devastation at having to give up this man.

Melville's most touching film.

Extended showing through May 30, 2017 at Film Forum Melville 100 retrospective, NYC

Melville 100 Berkeley
Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - 7:00 (130 mins) BAM/PFA
Sunday, July 16 - 7:00 (130 mins) BAM/PFA