Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967" Le samourai," starring Alain Delon, is one of my favorite movies. It turns out that it is John Woo's favorite one, and Woo arranged for the first American release of the full 140-minutes of Melville's 1970 "Le cercle rouge" (Red Circle) also starring Delon. Melville's austere, slow-paced "thrillers" (including "Bob, le flambeur" with Roger Duchesne, "Le Doulous" with Jean-Paul Belmondo, and "Un flic" again with Delon) have been much admired, first by the nouvelle vogue film critics turned directors (Godard and Truffaut) and later by such directors as Martin Scorcese, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-wai, Johnny To, and John Woo.

As this list of admirers suggests, Melville's films show a world of tough males of cops, robbers, and hit-men. Women barely count as distractions, though in Le samourai Nathalie Delon distracts and thereby leads to the destruction of Alain Delon's "samurai" hit-man. There is a scene of female nudity, several scenes of female dancers in a night-club, and a scene in which the night-club's flower seller gives Delon a rose, but I do not recall a single line being uttered by a woman in "Le cercle rouge". None of the four main characters (a police inspector, an ex-policeman ace marksman, an escaped crime suspect, and a thief just released from prisoners) has any visible relationship with a woman, and it is a surprise to find that the night-club owner has a son. The police inspector has three cats.

The men have each other? Well, they rely on each other. Loyalty and professionalism are their visible values, though they do not expect loyalty from each other. Corey (Delon) has just met the two men, the fugitive Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) and the ex-cop Jansen (Yves Montand) with whom he pulls a heist suggested to him in the film's first scene by a prison guard commander.

Before the three get together on a very intricate job, we see Vogel's escape from a train and his police escort police Commissaire Mattei (André Bourvil) and a very large-scale manhunt with dogs and legions of policemen. Corey's release from prison, visit to a gangster he protected when he took the rap for a job, and encounter with two goons sent after him. Then Vogel hides in the trunk of the car Corey bought, doesn't shoot Corey—who coolly throws him a pack of cigarettes and his lighter—, gets back in the trunk, emerges again from the trunk at a crucial time for Corey, and in Corey's Paris apartment (where, amazingly, none of the gangsters seeking him look!) agrees to work with Corey on the jewelry-store robbery. They need an ace marksman and Vogel knows a former cop, Jansen, who was one.

It is more than an hour into the movie when the audience first sees Jansen. And what an introduction it is! He is in the throes of the D.T.s and what he hallucinates the audience sees. Having a job to do sobers him up. An hour and a half into the movie, the job begins. There is no background music, but the moves are very carefully choreographed. Other than being shot in (fairly muted) colors, the job is filmed as austerely as in a Bresson film.

I don't like heist movies. At least this one does not have the cliché that I think Melville invented (for Bob, la flambeur) of one last job before retiring (The Score, The Heist, etc.). I tend to admire professional competence in anything, but resent being drawn into identifying with thieves (even more than being drawn into identifying with hit men...). I guess that somehow the Robin Hood legend did not take for me as a child. Nevertheless, the heist herein is an interesting challenge and rivals the ones in Jules Dassin's films.

I'm more interested in the hunt. Commissioner Mattei is not a particularly sympathetic figure. (Maybe he is to cat fanciers.) He is another professional who is good at his job of tracking down criminals. (Escorting them across the country, he's not as good at.) Hard as he is, the head of police internal affairs (Le directeur de la P.J., played by René Berthier) makes him seem soft-hearted for considering that a suspect might be innocent, telling Mattei "All men are guilty. They're born innocent, but it doesn't last. We all change for the worse."

It being a Melville film, doom is certain. The only question is "How?" And, as influenced as Melville was by the vision of male camaraderie in Howard Hawks, Melville does not deliver beautiful heroic deaths to the fatalistic heroes. He does include a very Hawksian redemption, Jansen's, from a frequent Hawksian malady, alcoholism, "for the team," however ad hoc a team (think Dean Martin in "Rio Bravo" and Robert Mitchum in "El Dorado").

The incidents of violence are quick flashes, not the slow-motion ballets of violence in Peckinpagh or various admirers of Melville and/or Peckinpagh. For a "thriller," the pace of "Le cercle rouge" is remarkably slow. The wintry backdrop is bleak, too. I wasn't bored (though I might have cut some of the dances and Mattei's two cat-feedings) and thought that the action scenes were superbly done.

Delon with a very 1970s mustache and sideburns says very little. As in "Le samourai" he is inscrutable. He seemed to have aged a lot in the decade since he had burst on the scene with the leading roles in "Purple Noon" and "Rocco and His Brothers" and had transformed from the somewhat gawky Tom Ripley in the former to the ultra-cool criminal of Le samourai and this film.

Gian Maria Volonté (El Indio in "A Few Dollars More" the writer Carlo Levi in "Christ Stopped at Eboli") is also much of a cipher. The audience never learns what the crime for which he was arrested was (probably Maoist terrorism; he does not seem a professional criminal). He's the character who is easiest to identify with, being the most spontaneous. Plus, it's hard not to sympathize with the prey of so many hunters.

Yves Montand was a pretty cool dude, too (Wages of Fear, Z, etc.). It's all the better when it's bluff. As Jansen he is credible as a drunk and just right as the drunk recovering his skills and literally going along with Corey. Most of his backstory is invisible, too.

I've already noted that André Bourvil is not particularly especially sympathetic. I also have difficulty crediting that he would have gone along in transporting a suspect from Paris to Marseilles and be involved in robbery and murder investigations... However, Bourvil plays the part Melville wrote very well.

In sum, "Le cercle rouge" is chilly in look and perspective and meticulously constructed. It is devoid of romance, devoid of sex, nearly devoid of sentiment, and lacking speaking parts for women. Melville's late films creates "a universe without the possibility for salvation, in which love and friendship are brief interludes in the cat-and-mouse games that lead to certain destruction" (quoting Steve Cohn). "Le samourai" is the best—shot in such muted colors that I remember it being black-and-white) and focused more tightly on a single existentialist protagonist—, but "Le cercle rouge" is an impressive heir of the 1940s cinema noire tradition (complete with trench-coats, fedoras, frequent cigarettes, and an American car), and a bridge to hard-boiled color films of the 1990s and 2000.


The Criterion DVD

In addition to transferring the Rialto restoration of the film to DVD, the Criterion DVD has a whole second disk of bonus materials, plus a 24-page booklet: with a page of appreciation of romanticized brotherhood from film-maker John Woo, an analysis of the film by critics Michael Sragow and of the title's trope by Chris Fujiwara, plus excerpts from Rui Nogueira's book Melville on Melville about the film, and two pages from composer Eric Demarsan about working again with Melville (Melville was unhappy with the music Michel Legrand had written for "Le cercle rouge" and wanted something like John Lewis's score for Robert Wise's "Odds Against Tomorrow". "He didn't want to dramatize in the traditional way, with old-style effects. He preferred... music that carries the abstract and metaphysical aspect of the film.")

(As much as I appreciate all that Criterion releases offer, I wish that their booklets would list the bonus material, not just the chapters of the main feature.)

There are two (subtitled French) theatrical trailers (one from the original release, one from the 2002 re-release), about half an hour of Melville talking (in a 1971 interview by Janine Bazin), about half an hour of television interviews of Melville (in all four), Delon (in two), and Montand (in one) during the shooting of the movie and at the time of its initial release. There is an extensive gallery of posters from many languages for the film, and an extensive set of stills.

The two new (2002) interviews can't really be characterized as "talking heads," because both interviewees speak a lot with their hands. The discourse by Rui Nogueira (Melville on Melville editor) is inordinately self-centered. When Nogueira talks about anyone other than himself, what he says echoes the far more interesting discourse by "Le cercle rouge" assistant director Bernard Stora, in particular, how frustrated and unhappy with Melville's methods Gian Maria Volonté was. Melville was none too happy with Volonté either ("wearying" is the word he chooses). At one point Volonté quit and was persuaded to return by Alain Delon, who also didn't much like him, but was a model of professionalism, and the consummate Melville star.

In his Stetson hat, trench coat, and dark glasses, and driving big American convertibles, Melville was an easily recognized celebrity in Paris. Some of the flamboyance of his appearance is matched by his categorical utterances for French television. He says that the parts of film-making he enjoyed were writing and editing — both of which he could do at night and alone. Nogueira and Stora both report that Melville did not much like the actual shooting of movies, which required him to work during the day and with other people. He rarely shot more than one take. (There is a funny story about Bouvril's request for a second take of the last ("All men are guilty") scene.) Melville liked to post-dub dialogue (as is routine in Italian movies, but very unusual in French ones.)

Melville claims that he researched and wrote the heist scene in 1950 (just after completing "Les enfants terribles") before John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle". Filming a movie centering on a jewlery store heist was delayed again by "Rififi", which he was supposed to direct (he does not mention Dassin's later "Topkapi", but "Le cercle rouge" was shot another half dozen years after "Topkapi"). In the excerpt fromMelville on Melville, Melville suggests that rather than being a French noir film, "Le cercle rouge" is more of a western transferred to Paris ca. 1970 (and with a Buddhist title...)

The Melville interview, the Stora interview, and the joint talk-show appearance of Melville and Delon enhance understanding. The Nogueira one can be skipped except by those interested in Nogueira.

(I reviewed the theatrical release of the full version, but when I wanted to add material on the DVD and searched movies, no reviews were shown.)


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age