Le samouraï

Seemingly constructed of pulp fantasies and hard-boiled daydreams, Le samouraï remains Jean-Pierre Melville’s sleekest, most-hip genre construction. The title has extra meaning, if one embraces eccentric French director’s adherance to a self-invented stylization, as rigid as a Japanese play. Star Alain Delon spends the entire picture in a post-intellectual funk, where straightening one’s hat in the mirror is a meaningful personal ritual. The miracle is that Melville’s creation maintains a credible straightforward narrative. It all works beautifully.

Viewers not yet familiar with writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville have a treat coming, provided they’re not allergic to reading subtitles. The cowboy-hatted Parisian director loved big American cars almost as much as American crime pictures. His most respected film may now be his ode to the resistance Army of Shadows. Aficionados will find more complexity in his gritty B&W classics like  Le doulos, and his ‘straight’ drama  Léon Morin, Priest. But Le samouraï is an excellent launch point into Melville’s world.

Melville’s touchstone American crime film was John Huston’s  The Asphalt Jungle. His Le samouraï resembles the old Alan Ladd thriller This Gun for Hire, the Graham Greene classic about an ultra-efficient assassin betrayed by his employers. Melville gives his policier a smooth, cool surface tension, and stylizes the ritual elements almost to the point of abstraction. Alain Delon’s hired killer Jef Costello remains professionally impassive throughout. Compared to this icicle, Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s somewhat similar Point Blank is downright emotional.

Interestingly enough, the same year’s Point Blank always played as if a crime story had been squeezed through a Euro ‘art’ filter. It resembles an Alain Resnais memory puzzle:  ‘Last Year at Alcatraz,’ perhaps.  By contrast,Le samourai just feels like an original approach to a traditional genre — half retro, half progressive.

Killer-for-hire Jef Costello (Alain Delon) carries out a contract in a nightclub but is seen by a jazz pianist (Cathy Rosier). Although she refuses to identify him in a lineup, the police superintendent (Francois Périer) intuits that Jef is his man and puts pressure on Jane Lagrange (Nathalie Delon), Jef’s alibi. When Jef’s employers attempt to liquidate him, he doubles back to get revenge, and starts by investigating the pianist, to find out why she covered for him. Both the cops and opposing hit men close in, putting Jef in a no-win situation. He seeks a way out consistent with his austere personal code.

Calling Le samouraï formulaic misses the idea completely. Although the title suggests Samurai romanticism, we’re given a dry, ritualized cause-and-effect narrative with an anti-emotional underworld figure who lives or dies on the basis of cold equations. Alain Delon’s icy charisma lends credibility to a somewhat glamorous, artificial construct, from a filmmaker in love with genre conventions and noir stylistics. His vision of stoic male heroism requires a star personality. It may have inspired imitations, but the original stands alone.

In the ‘sixties the word Samurai still carried an aura of mystery, so much so that Melville could invent a fake quote from “The Book of Bushido” and not attract ridicule. This very non- New Wave movie proved immensely popular in Europe but was not imported to the United States, where Alain Delon’s bid for Hollywood fame (Texas Across the River) had made zero impact. Le samouraï reached America only five years later, re-titled The Godson in a feeble attempt to ride the success of The Godfather. When we saw the ‘Godson’ trailer in a packed theater, it was laughed off the screen.

This isn’t a film with laughs. Every scene follows the cause-and-effect logic preferred by deadpan police procedural films. Melville and co-writer Georges Pelligrin avoid all but essential dialogue. No room is left for humor, or let alone names for most of the characters. The stylization starts with the costuming. By 1967 hats were all but gone from the streets of Paris, but Melville brought them back for Le samouraï.

In 1967, a hit man that behaves like a well-oiled automaton was not yet a tired cliché. Jef Costello is a self-contained, unyielding original, a man of few words and zero emotional display. He rises, feeds the bird (echoes of Graham Greene), steals a car, establishes an alibi and then assassinates his designated victim. We can read almost anything we wish into his mask-like face. Reviewers fixate on a shot where Jef’s eyes move a little bit, and leap to theorize that he is a functioning schizophrenic. Some of today’s audience may decide that the movie is a tongue-in-cheek joke, a riff on crime conventions. Jean-Pierre Melville almost certainly wanted Le samouraï to be taken as straight storytelling. He even eliminated a final shot in which Jef, as he turns defeat into an ‘occupational victory,’ laughs in triumph.

The killings are few and far apart, with more significance given to elaborate set pieces: a lineup, the superintendent’s attempt to break Jef’s alibi. None of the action is extraordinary but it’s always credible, as when Jef uses the Metro to shake dozens of detectives off his tail. His most effective weapon is a dogged refusal to be diverted from his chosen path. A confrontation with an enemy hit man becomes an exercise in professional etiquette. They exchange notes on each other’s working philosophy. When Jef realizes he’s caught in a bind between cops and crooks, his efforts go toward staying true to his personal code. Even when no longer trying to win, he remains in control of his destiny.

Pure star quality accounts for some of the film’s appeal. Alain Delon is so handsome that he’s almost pretty, something that was often said about Alan Ladd as well. Delon’s soon-to-be ex-wife Nathalie Delon is a sullen, loyal woman he uses for an alibi, and Cathy Rosier charms as his mysterious ‘jazz pianist of destiny,’ that some pinpoint as a symbol of death. Francois Périer’s sober policeman lends respect to the side of law and order.

Jean-Pierre Melville prefers to make his camera as appropriately deadpan as his leading character, avoiding photographic tricks. He performs a tracking-zoom on his first shot, and a transition between crooks and cops is managed with a Fritz Lang-like rhyming cut. That’s about it for ‘director’s touches.’  There is no middle ground in Le samouraï. Genre critics agree that it’s a key title in the gangster genre.