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Le Doulos

The America-obsessed but somehow ineffably French, Jean-Pierre Melville delivers another noiresque gangster film.

This exciting but doomy thriller was made in 1963. Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, it's knee-deep in shadows, intrigue and suspicion and characters with perfectly tilted hats but shifty morals...

The film is made of elements Melville said he came to love in the B&W American crime movies of the 1930s: shadows, night, trench coats, guns, tough guys, cigarettes, slinky dames, cocktail bars, crooked cops, betrayal...

...narrative confusion between good and bad is seductively expressed in its miasmatic atmosphere.

This excessively cheerless policier from 1962 sits smack dab at the centre of Jean-Pierre Melville’s career as a writer and director of muscular films about bewitching anti-heros and the artisans of France’s criminal underworld.