“Was he really the first to copy American hoods?” remarks a wannabe gangster in reference to the title character in the 1956 film Bob le flambeur. An older gentlemen retorts, “Actually, it was the Yanks who copied the Bonnot Gang.” In a film that functions at least partly as a commentary on the filmmaking process, with the planning of a heist paralleling the precise orchestration of a cinematic scene, it is hard not to read this exchange as a self-reflexive wink on the part of the film’s director, Jean-Pierre Melville, a self-professed films noir enthusiast who once claimed to have been “formed and deformed to a great extent by the first American gangster novels.” With his preference for cops-and-robbers plots and unflappable heroes, Melville was often seen as the most American of midcentury Gallic directors, even if the man himself was quick to distinguish his Frenchness, noting the echoes between his characters’ unresolved inner turmoil and that of a generation of résistants after the war. Such a dichotomy between open acknowledgment of Hollywood influence and insistence upon deeply personal, even nationalistic themes was central to the director’s inimitable Ray Ban-and-Stetson persona, a natural temperament for an artist who returned repeatedly to the subject of public masks and private codes. 

The Jean-Pierre Melville who fought in Operation Dragoon in the Allied invasion of Provence in 1944 was in fact Jean-Pierre Grumbach (1917 - 1973), a man keen to both the necessity and fanfare of disguise. A committed devotee of Charles de Gaulle, the young Grumbach joined the Resistance during World War II, changing his name to avoid detection of his Jewish identity by occupying German forces—while also nodding to the beloved author of Moby Dick. His wartime experiences, during which his brother died crossing the Pyrenees, inform the grave introspection on which his films are founded, though it was the furtive life under Vichy rule that truly dictated the form and expression of them. His first film, Le silence de la mer (1949), adapted from a clandestine Resistance novel, depicts the vow of silence taken by a man and his niece living in a provincial home suddenly playing host to a visiting Nazi officer. A chamber drama of intense emotional gravity, the film set a prescient template for Melville’s career in its fixation on characters for whom silence is not a passive act but a conscientious way of life and a force of moral virtue.

Le silence de la mer was a prototype in another way as well: the film’s independent production outside the French studio system set a standard that Melville would almost never abandon, even as offers from the establishment (both local and abroad) came streaming in. “It’s terrifying—you’re completely imprisoned by the small print,” said Melville of American contracts, and the director accordingly proceeded to answer only to himself, carving out a career of uncommonly single-minded vision. The lone exception to this rule, the Italian co-production When You Read This Letter (1953), allowed him the financial flexibility to establish his own soundstage: Studio Jenner in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, where even a 1967 fire during the filming of Le samouraï that turned the whole building into embers could not extinguish Melville’s commitment to self-sufficiency. He finished that film in another Paris studio, then set about rebuilding the facilities on Rue Jenner until the production of Army of Shadows (1969) occasioned their grand reopening.

Entirely unique within the unionized French film industry, Melville’s claim to his own film studio enabled him to master the art of soundstage shooting throughout the 1960s, though ironically his most indelible stamp on film history may have been his devil-may-care location photography, pioneered with cinematographer Henri Decaë, which heavily influenced the Young Turks of the French New Wave. Bob le flambeur employed handheld cameras and available light to immerse the audience in a distinguished hustler’s twilight peregrinations in Montmartre; Two Men in Manhattan (1959) drank in the seedy glories of New York City nightlife; and Magnet of Doom (1963) decamped to the swamps of Louisiana for its fateful final act, mixing time-capsule glimpses of downtrodden American backroads with stage-bound interior scenes. At Melville’s creative peak, the hybrid of real locations and uncannily designed studio sets situated his films in a liminal state that reflected his characters’ purgatorial tension between self-imprisonment and longed-for salvation.

This tension was certainly a byproduct of the Resistance, and yet Melville most often sublimated it through stories of career gangsters and assassins and the merciless lawmen who pursue them. Time and again, he returns to the age-old narrative template of a fatigued lone wolf chasing one final score, a scenario in which the police chief invariably “represents inescapable destiny,” per Melville in a 1968 issue of Sight and Sound. With the exquisite exception of Léon Morin, Priest (1961), a penetrating psychological study of an agnostic played by Emmanuelle Riva and her charged encounters with a handsome clergyman played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, all of Melville’s films center on an exclusively male world in which indestructible codes of honor preclude substantial interpersonal communication. Dialogue is terse and functional if employed at all, and, as the director proclaimed in a 1963 television interview, “all the rest is action.”

A quintessential Melvillian sequence occurs at the midway point of his swan song Un Flic (1972), finished a year before the formidable auteur succumbed to a heart attack. Realized with oddly quaint miniatures, a locomotive barrels across a misty nocturnal landscape. Inside it, a lackey with three suitcases of cocaine; above it, a helicopter carrying three criminals pursuing that cargo. A vertiginous montage of aerial and lateral perspectives methodically depicts the careful descent of one brave hoodlum down a pully hook onto the train, across to the cabin of interest where he dispatches the keeper of the freight, and then back up to the helicopter undiscovered. Barely any words are spoken, and the soundtrack is purely the musique concrète of the churning train and hovering chopper. Here, Melville’s cinema is distilled to its essence, and the result, as in the best of his films, is both hypnotically riveting and, insofar as it depicts labor as an almost automated compulsion masking a wounded inner life, indescribably mournful. – Carson Lund

Due to emergency renovations, the HFA had to unexpectedly close this summer, upending plans for a Melville et Cie. series featuring all of the films by the legendary director as well as features by his like-minded contemporaries. Thanks to a collaboration with the Brattle Theatre, we were able to offer an extensive prologue, which included Melville’s early When You Read This Letter, now unavailable to screen in the US. Now that Melville is back at the HFA, Brattle members can still receive $2 off admission to any of the screenings in this series.