Le Doulos

Jean-Pierre Melville didn’t direct that many movies in his quarter century as a filmmaker, but almost all of them are superior pictures. His first crime picture  Bob le flambeur followed Jacques Becker’s  Touchez pa au Grisbi and Jules Dassin’s  Rififi chez les hommes, launching the modern French underworld genre. Melville followed up with the less-known but excellent  Two Men in Manhattan, and then began an association with actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. Their second picture Le doulos is one of the finest hardboiled crime movies ever, in any language.

Le Doulos comes from a book by Pierre Lesou, whose work was adapted for another notable crime picture, 1970’s  The Cop with Michel Bouquet. Melville credits himself only with adapting the novel, indicating that Lesou’s storyline was kept intact. It is one of the tightest caper scripts ever, without an ounce of narrative fat.

What makes a Melville film special?   The director loved American cars, clothes, and especially hardboiled American crime fiction. When it came to recreating the pulp thrills found on paperback covers, these French crime thrillers put ours to shame. Le Doulos depicts everything verboten under the Hollywood Production Code: sympathetic sleazy characters, ruthless violence, casual nudity.

This Paris is stylized through the Hardboiled Tradition: although played out on the boulevards and empty lots of the City of Light, Le Doulos is as rigorous as a Japanese yakuza picture. Trench coats and American hats are regulation attire. Our night crawlers also drive oversized American cars, that sometimes barely fit on those narrow Paris byways.

The theme is Dishonor Among Thieves. Jean-Paul Belmondo is Silien, a cool customer who doesn’t play straight with the cops or his confederates in crime. A close-up of his hat confirms that Silien is bad news: a pretty nightclub attendant checks the hat, and tags it #13. The film’s title translates as ‘the wearer of the hat,’ but it is also Parisian crime jargon for a police informer. How shady is Silien?  He doesn’t seem to tell anybody the honest truth. We expect movie crooks to lie, but the mendacity here is so pervasive that we spend the film’s first hour in a state of disorientation.

Pierre Lesou’s suspense concoction is logical, yet so complicated that a pause is built into the last act so that Silien can recap what his confederates missed. We assume that he is feeding them a pack of lies. He has no friends, but his closest cohort is the ex-convict Maurice Faugle. He’s played by the star Serge Reggiani, who years before was a dashing romantic leading man. The way the tired-looking Faugle regards himself in a broken mirror, we know he’s the flawed hero.

This loser Faugle returns from four years in prison to exact revenge on a fence (René Lefèvre), for reasons not immediately disclosed. Although a thief and a murderer, Maurice doesn’t rat on his friends, whose honor he trusts until proven otherwise. His loyal confederates really believe in this Criminal Code… a weakness that schemers like Silien can exploit.

Don’t expect to meet a ‘noble crook’ one can root for. Silien’s method is so brilliant, his victims believe he’s their best friend. Or could he be looking out for them as well, in his own twisted way?

Film Noir abounds with sharpies that think they can play both ends against the middle, the tragic example being Harry Fabian in the uncompromised  Night and the City. So we keep wondering if Belmondo’s Silien is in line for a brutal comeuppance. He gets away with outrageous deceptions, smooth-talking the police and playing the stand-up good pal for the trusting Faugle. He seduces an old girlfriend in just a few minutes, and secures her aid in his schemes. He doesn’t even come close to tripping up.

Le Doulos has plenty of well-staged action: a safecracking robbery, some point-blank murders, the killing of a police detective. Police Superintendent Clain (Jean Desailly) can’t shake the truth out of either Silien or Flaugel. Crooked nightclub owner Nuttheccio (guest star Michel Piccoli)  →  hasn’t a chance when framed by Silien for robbery and murder.

Only in retrospect do we realize that the narrative sees women primarily as betrayers, even when they are kept on the sidelines. Faugel’s bad decisions stem from trust in his girlfriends. In a sequence of surprising cruelty, Silien mercilessly torments the beautiful blonde Thérèse (Monique Hennessey) for information he needs for his scheme. He ties her up as if performing a household chore. His strategic endgame is to reclaim his old flame Fabienne (Fabienne Dali of  Kill, Baby … Kill) and eliminate the man who stole her away. He’s ready to take an early retirement in the country, in a new house with horses and a stable.

The tale unspools with unerring logic and clarity. Jean-Pierre Melville’s camera strategy never becomes obvious or dull. One five-minute scene in a police station plays out with only one cut, constantly re-framing itself as Belmondo’s crook steps back and forth, dogged by the questions of Jean Desailly and his cops. We do raise an eyebrow at the way these people park those big Detroit cars — they block other parked cars, and at one point, even an entire street.

Almost all of the characters are sympathetic, even if the one we most like commits a cold-blooded murder in the very first scene. Nobody behaves like a standard Hollywood hero or villain. The acting is natural, with Belmondo smoothly sincere and Reggiani doggedly honorable. The triple-twist ending is especially satisfying. It’s an improvement on the clever gimmick at the end of the noir quickie The Pretender (1947). In this amoral world, one honorable act can ring down the curtain on everyone. Melville, we’re told, was almost obsesssed with John Huston’s  The Asphalt Jungle. He strove to recreate it in his various crime pix, which invariably see flawed men swallowed up by their own notions of camaraderie and teamwork.

On this our third viewing of Le doulos, we realize that it might be more ambiguous than we thought — it’s possible to interpret Silien’s ‘malicious’ actions in an entirely different way. Is it possible that his story re-cap is actually sincere, and he is looking out for the sad sack Maurice Faugel?  Was returning Faugel’s money really a cynical move, to make himself appear benign?  At the finale, Silien rushes to Faugel’s aid, with genuine concern.

Jean-Paul Belmondo was of course just at the beginning of an illustrious career. Actor Jean Desailly was chosen by François to play a romantic lead in his 1964  The Soft Skin. All the players in Le doulos are gone now, with Belmondo passing in 2021. His impressive  state funeral  was as grand an exit as one can imagine. Actor Philippe Nahon died of COVID complications, in 2020.