Home How It Works Previews
Writings Reviews
Students Programs e-mail
us!
LE DOULOS
(1962)
Jean-Paul
Belmondo, Serge Reggiani, Fabienne Dali, Michel Piccoli; dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
Jean-Pierre
Melville is best known for a series of stylish, muscular and cleverly plotted thrillers
which updated the gangster genre from 1955 to 1972. He
also brought his filmmaking strengths to other categories of drama including his
Occupation trilogy, based on his own shadowy experiences in the Resistance during the war
as well as two films set, and partially shot, in the USA.
Le
Doulos
is based on a 1957 novel of the same name by Pierre Lesou, who enjoyed a certain notoriety
in France
for his close ties to underworld circles, as reflected in his writing. The novel is one of the legendary Serie Noire
paperback thrillers whose pulp fiction was to France what the Black Mask series, which
incubated stars like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, was to America. Strongly influenced by the US
hardboiled ethos, and in fact reprinting many of those writers’ seminal works
including James M.Cain’s, the Serie Noire was in its glory years in the early
1960s.
Besides
its title, Melville’s film takes its structure, characters' names and much of its
dialogue straight from the book. One of his
production collaborators observed him literally cutting and pasting whole sections into
the shooting script. Nevertheless, Le
Doulos is an exercise in pure cinema.
It
was a huge box office hit. Star Jean-Paul
Belmondo was on a roll after the success of his star turn in Godard's A Bout De Souffle (aka Breathless
- 1960) and experiencing the first flush of superstardom as that nouvelle vague
smash was mirrored in mainstream cinema by his roles in Cartouche (1962) as a
Gallic Robin Hood opposite Claudia Cardinale and Melville’s own Léon Morin, prêtre (1961). Melville admired Belmondo’s underplaying and
compared him favourably to the American icons Robert Ryan and even Humphrey Bogart. This was no small irony after Belmondo’s role
in A Bout De Souffle as an insouciant punk literally modeling himself on the
hardboiled Bogey persona displayed on a film poster of the latter's The Harder They
Fall. Now Belmondo was the star of this
film's posters. His Le Doulos co-star
Serge Reggiani, playing smalltime hood Faugel, was Italian-born but raised in France, and
had starred in Jacques Becker’s hit Casque D'Or (1952) but found it tough
going after that, to the point where he was considered something of a jinx on subsequent
productions.
The
title Le Doulos carries overtones of 'doleur' (pain in French) and 'dolorous'
(miserable in English) and both are apt. However here it most literally means 'hat', and
since its central character Silien (Belmondo) is a police informer, a snitch, perhaps its
meaning can be seen as 'wearing two hats' – the singular presumably because then
every man wore one hat, stool pigeon or not. Headgear, and clothing generally, are key elements
of the film's mise-en-scene. It was
this recurring 'hat' motif that the Coen brothers would pick up on to signal an homage to Le Doulos in their gangster classic Miller's Crossing (1991), which opens in a
cross-cut exactly where this film ends, on a fedora lying on the ground, effectively
making it a segue and thus a continuation. This
is also apt as both centre on gangsters telling stories which may or not be lies or
truths.
Le
Doulos
is rich in classic thriller virtues, particularly the superb noir cinematography of
Nicolas Hayer as well as the genre's expected tension and edginess. But it's a justly celebrated sequence near its
climax, which moved Cahiers Du Cinema to rhapsodise that this was a film of
"moral reflexion on truth and lies", that takes it to another level altogether
and which moved Cahiers to elevate it to its Top 100 films list.
In this sequence, in which Belmondo’s character basically recasts every
‘fact’ we’ve seen in the film to date, the power held over audiences by the
storyteller is laid bare. His Silien becomes
in effect a filmmaker within the film, upending everything we’ve seen until then. It’s a move that raises intriguing
speculations about the stoolpigeon-as-storyteller and their relation to the
author-as-authority. Kurosawa's Rashomon
(1951) paved the way for such experimentation in perspective and meaning, and one only
hungers for more filmmakers like Melville who are willing to take such advances further.
The
trailer for Le Doulos called it "a tragedy of lies" and Melville himself
always pointed out that there is no absolute certainty about whose 'truth' in the film is
absolute. Belmondo’s literally
're-vision-ist' sequence, coming as it does in a dark crime thriller harking back to the
classic film noir era of the 1940s, also readily enables a critique of the 40s
omnipotence in Hollywood of the Hays Code. Its
strictures requiring endings that punish heretofore glamorous hoods, regardless of how
such narrative backflips would invert everything seen in the preceding 85 minutes, reflect
what Silien tries to do here.
As
part of his challenge to authorial authority in cinema narrative, Melville never allows us
an interior perspective on any characters, relying instead on a constant exchange of truth
and lies. One consequence of this is that we
in the audience are constantly shocked by what unfolds.
This
raises some interesting speculation about this enigmatic filmmaker. Duality is explicit in the sequence discussed
above. It also inheres in Melville’s
renowned admiration for all his gangster characters’ professionalism, a mirror of his
own self regard as a maverick outside the French industry’s system. The choices these characters have made, as
reflected in their externalities of dress, speech, manner and milieu, bred in
Melville’s gangster canon a determinism that extends to what's inside them as people,
particularly this sense of a 'code' to be respected at all costs. It is when that stability experiences a crack, a
chink in their grim armour, that their doom become inevitable.
The
fact that even one small misstep must seal a character’s fate strongly links these
films to classic Hollywood noir, where the same causality is fundamental, though
typically suffered by amateur suburban men, the complete antitheses of Melville’s'
professional class. In Le Doulos
Faugel’s fears that he may not be able to cut it in crime after his last stretch
inside mark him clearly as doomed, as the title credits underline when he walks under a
row of crossbars reminiscent of the 'X' imagery in 1932’s pioneering Scarface which similarly prefigures its characters' fates. Melville was a renowned fan of the 1930s Hollywood
cinema, and it shows.
Professionalism
also places Melville in a key role in the cinematic continuum, started by This Gun For Hire
(1942), of the icy hitman whose undoing starts with one act of human kindness. It’s a continuum which stretches through
successive decades from Murder By Contract (1958) to Jim
Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999), encompassing
along the way, by analogy, Coppola’s The
Conversation (where the directional microphone is a clear stand-in for a sniper’s
rifle, and just as deadly). Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) is the key link in this chain
from the 1960s.
Melville's
renowned coolness of observation, his detachment, is itself an index of professionalism. Combined with his loving attention to mise-en-scene,
his cinema replaces the didacticism American cinema often displays, relying heavily on the
possibility of transformation and redemption, with a sense of resignation, of acceptance,
what Australian scholar Adrian Danks calls a “stoic melancholy". For Melville’s characters there's no breaking
out of their assigned roles. As in a dream, we
can only observe, but not affect anything, still less fate.
Melville,
an avowed America-phile taken to wearing a Stetson behind the wheel of his various
American rides while ostentatiously swigging on Coca-Cola back when that meant something,
is renowned for the Americanness of his mise-en-scene. Cars,
clothing and interior décor, such as the bar in Le Doulos modeled on Hollywood
models, appear like nothing ever sighted in France, as does the police station modeled on
Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (1931). This
feeds the oneiric quality of his movies. The
incongruity of a ‘65 Chevy being tailed by a Plymouth
of similar vintage through a French forest, as in his Le Cercle Rouge
(1970) removes such an image from the quotidian reality it would reflect if set in America,
thus making it timeless through being so abstracted.
I
suspect this fusion, of the best of both US and French worlds, was Melville’s passion
reified on celluloid. Certainly his filmmaking
associates report that many of the elements typical of his films, such as nocturnal
driving, accurately mirror his own lifestyle. Hence
the central irony of the association of his early work with that of the French New Wave,
which he self -consciously stood outside of. Rather
than showing characters believing, absurdly as Belmondo does in Breathless, that
'life is a movie', Melville actually makes it so.
I
think the Coen brothers recognised something about Melville through opening Miller’s
Crossing in an autumn forest of falling leaves. The
undercurrent of acceptance and inevitability that runs throughout Melville’s gangster
series, and which fit seamlessly with the settings of his thrillers, conspire to suggest
that Melville ultimately was an autumnal
filmmaker. I mean this both through the muted
visual palettes he used, and in his distanced, rueful observations as life, color and
honour drain away. Like his aloofness from the
industry in which he moved, it’s a stance which ensured his originality and integrity
of vision, and ensures his thrillers have a timeless quality today.
- Roger Westcombe