The Complete Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville, “known mainly for his mesmerizing crime dramas,” as Bilge Ebiri wrote in the Village Voice in 2017, “terse, poetic studies of alienation and betrayal, patience and procedure,” rattles a television studio audience by declaring, as he often did, that the best years of his life were those he spent fighting, first in the army and then with the French Resistance, during the Second World War.

One witness in Bohler’s film suggests that it was the intensity of camaraderie among his fellow soldiers that invigorated Melville, while another holds that he was inspired by singular acts of bravery on the part of lone men. Whether it’s either or both, as Robert O. Paxton wrote in 2011, “the words and adventures of his friends and acquaintances greatly influenced his telling of the story” of Army of Shadows (1969), which as Olivier Assayas has put it, is “not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure.”

On August 2, New York’s Film Forum will launch the theatrical run of a new restoration of Army of Shadows, and starting Friday, Film Forum will lay the groundwork with a retrospective, The Complete Melville, which will head to the Harvard Film Archive in the fall. “While the political gravity of his life in the Resistance and the thrills of American genre filmmaking may seem like contradictory influences,” wrote the late Bertrand Tavernier in 2019, “they are peripheral if not superficial, and they in no way compromise a body of work striking in its coherence, consistency, and unity of tone and style.”

Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in 1917, Melville fell hard for the movies as a boy. He briefly had a job as a courier for diamond dealers, carrying bags of gems through the streets of Paris. If he spotted a movie theater, he’d pop in and plop down, bags and all. Fortunately, he was never robbed—but he was caught and fired. He carried on watching movies, though, often at a rate of five a day.

During his time with the Resistance, Melville chose a good number of pseudonyms—Cartier, Nono—but the one selected as an admiring nod to the author of Moby-Dick was the one that stuck. When the war was over, he was determined to make films, and failing to find a job as an assistant director, he set up his own studio.

For his first feature, Le silence de la mer (1949), Melville wrote and directed an adaptation of a 1942 novel by Jean Bruller, who wrote and clandestinely distributed the book under the pseudonym Vercors during the Nazi occupation. A German officer is billeted in the home of a middle-aged Frenchman and his niece and proves himself to be steeped in their culture.

“Melville and his close collaborator the brilliant cinematographer Henri Decaë (whose first feature this also was) worked on a tight schedule, with a hodgepodge of film stocks, and were forced to suggest events like the bombardment of Chartres and the German occupation of Paris by the most threadbare tricks of editing,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien. “Yet the visible signs of impoverishment in the production are in mysterious accordance with the film's themes of defeat and resistance.” Melville “would not make another [film] so austere or—for all his later masterpieces—more profoundly moving.”

When Jean Cocteau saw Le silence de la mer, he hired Melville to direct an adaptation of his 1929 novel Les enfants terribles, the story of what Bilge Ebiri described as “a pair of manipulative, borderline-incestuous siblings. Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermit) are a far cry from the gangsters and melancholy killers of Melville’s later films. But they exemplify the director’s fascination with extreme behavior and characters who seek to push the world away. Elisabeth regards anyone who comes into contact with the siblings as a threat to their relationship. That this desire to be alone together extends as far as murder and suicide is in keeping with the movie’s uniquely unsettling, surreal atmosphere (this is, after all, a Cocteau story), but it’s not far off from the pathological actions of later Melville protagonists.”

In Code Name Melville, Bohler nods to the legend that, when Jean-Luc Godard was fretting over the editing of Breathless (1960)—in which Melville appears in one scene as a celebrated writer—it was Melville who suggested that he simply jam the best parts of each shot up against each other. The jump cut, along with the handheld camera and location shooting, became key aesthetic hallmarks of the French New Wave.

All three make a showing in Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956), which “may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist,” wrote Lucy Sante in 2002. “It is also one of the most elegiac, with a twilight mood about it. Bob, as courtly and dignified as any all-night gambler ever was but willing to risk his serenity for one last big score, is in Melville’s view a relic of a bygone, pre-war world, when crooks had an independence and integrity not unlike Melville’s own.”

Working with producers Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti and New Wave stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, Melville tackled his first large-scale production with Léon Morin, Priest (1961). Riva’s Barny is a lapsed Catholic mother and the widow of a Jewish husband who finds herself falling for Belmondo’s priest.

“The film devotes a lavish amount of time to theological discussion, but the viewer is less inclined to ponder the nature of God and the mysteries of faith than to marvel at how incongruous and irresistible Jean-Paul Belmondo looks in a cassock,” writes Gary Indiana. “At the same time, Léon Morin derives its intensity less from the priest’s blandishments, however considerable, than from the surrounding absence of other men (they’re all off fighting in the Resistance, or in concentration camps) and the indirect way the film conveys the stresses of wartime.”

Belmondo is a shady underworld crook who informs on a recently paroled thief in Le doulos (1962), Melville’s “first true foray into the post–film noir, so-called Série noire crime genre in which he would subsequently forge some of his most celebrated works,” writes Glenn Kenny. “Melville makes his genre move with a vengeance; for all its atmospheric touches, it has a relentless forward movement unprecedented in any of his prior films. Which is at least slightly paradoxical, as all of Le doulos’ characters are living in the past.”

Le deuxième souffle (1966) is “an important watershed in the director’s career,” wrote Adrian Danks in 2008. “It points back to the somewhat abstract, elemental, and iconographically precise hypermasculine gangster milieu of Bob le flambeur and Le doulos and forward to the more expansive, rarefied, and philosophically circumspect works—such as Le samouraï (1967) and Le cercle rouge (1970)—that followed.” And its “preoccupation with issues of loyalty, heightened professionalism, solitude, and betrayal resonates clearly with Melville’s own status as an egotistical, reticent, fringe-dwelling figure in French cinema, who in spite of his success never really claimed membership or complicity in any established movement or ‘wave’ of filmmaking.”

Newly restored, Le samouraï screens tonight and Sunday in Bristol and next month in Vancouver and Kansas City. As professional killer Jef Costello, Alain Delon is “the distilled essence of cinema’s solitary guns for hire, suspended between the somnambulant calm of Lee Marvin in Point Blank and the self-destructive dedication that guides Robert Bresson’s curé in Diary of a Country Priest,” wrote David Thomson in 2005. “It doesn’t matter that the story is slight and unmotivated. The movie can be followed, over and over again, like music, because its configurations are so mysterious, so averse to everyday explanation.” Le samouraï “looks as abstract, yet as beautiful and as endlessly worthy of study, as the Giotto frescoes in the basilica in Assisi.”

The heart of Le cercle rouge, starring Delon and Yves Montand, is a nearly wordless heist sequence that runs for about half an hour. “I believe in brotherhood and everything that goes with it,” wrote John Woo (The Killer, Hard Boiled) in 2011. “Like honor, loyalty, and friendship. The reason why Le cercle rouge is a classic gangster film is because it embodies this kind of romanticism.”

Before his sudden death in 1973—he was only fifty-five—Melville made one last feature, Un flic (1972), with Delon switching sides to play the cop opposite Richard Crenna’s gangster. “There’s a woman involved, of course—Catherine Deneuve’s luminously vacant Cathy—as well as the City of Light crushing all the characters with rampant venality,” wrote Keith Uhlich for Time Out in 2013. “With barely a word spoken between them—mostly a series of virile glances—Delon and Crenna paint an idealized portrait of masculine camaraderie, one that’s exposed at the end of Melville’s bracing last testament as a soul-shattering illusion.”

“I’m not interested in realism,” Melville once said. “All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”