The Silences of Jean-Pierre Melville

I

At first, in the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Melville was celebrated as a precursor of the New Wave, for a while acknowledged as a practitioner, and then repudiated by Cahiers du cinema as too professional and classical, mainstream and popular. His recovery began in the '80s with revivals of some films and an enthusiastic reevaluation by Cahiers and has continued with more revivals. Most of his films are now available on DVD or VHS.

His work may at the time have seemed limited by his primary adherence to one genre, the gangster or film noir. There is, however, a consistency in quality, theme, and imprimatur from the first, non-noir, Le Silence de la mer in 1949, to the last, Un Flic in 1972 (Melville died in 1973), and many regard L'Armée des ombres (1969) as his masterpiece. But for this essay I am going to focus on the final trilogy of Melville's noir films, Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle rouge (1970), and Un Flic. Known as the Delon Trilogy, after Alain Delon, the star of all three, they are set off from the earlier films (with the major exception of Bob le flambeur of 1955), which were adaptations of novels, by the fact that Melville himself wrote as well as directed and produced them. There will nevertheless be side glances at L'Armée des ombres, which was based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, and I will end with some comments on another adaptation, Le Doulos (1963), which shows Melville imposing upon a novel by Pierre V. Lesou his own thematic concerns.

The terms used by Ginette Vincendeau to describe Melville's noir films (in Melville: An American in Paris of 2003, the richest work on Melville, to which I am greatly indebted) are classical, minimalist, and tragic. I would add austere and replace tragic with elegiac. By contrast, for Jean-Luc Godard (À Bout de souffle, 1959) and François Truffaut (Tirer sur le pianiste, 1960) the film noir thriller was only one of many cinematic genres, including science fiction, adventure, and even the musical. À Bout de souffle is ebullient, centrifugal, and prolix. The bedroom scene goes on and on in pointless chatter. In Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour of the same year, once out of the bedroom the man and woman will not stop talking: I will go, you must stay, I will stay, you must go. Melville's films have no digressions or asides and few words.

"I make gangster films," Melville said on one occasion, ". . . but I don't make American films, even though I like the American films noirs better than anything," and on another occasion he said his weren't really gangster films either. His protagonists are not the gangsters Robert Warshow wrote about in "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," referring to Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and Scarface (1930-32), movies about men rising from hoodlum to boss before being brought down, most often by the flaw of pride—superficially the action Aristotle described for tragedy in his Poetics. Warshow interpreted these gangster films as parodies of the American success story.

Melville's protagonists are closer to the private eye developed in the 1930s by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, projected in films of the 1940s like John Huston's Maltese Falcon (1941) and Howard Hawkes's Big Sleep (1946). Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are outsiders, ex- and anti-police detectives. In John Irwin's words, in his study of hard-boiled fiction and film noir, "Spade [is] his own boss and, in effect, the creator and arbiter of his own professional code of conduct." Aloneness is what characterizes Spade and Marlowe. The novels follow their movements as they solve a puzzle, skillfully maneuvering among suspects, witnesses, threats, and temptations. To the integrity of his profession the sleuth subordinates all else, including lovers; Spade invokes his partner Archer when he rejects Brigid O'Shaughnessy and turns her in to the police, and when Marlowe begins to get interested in marriage, the novels stop. Further, as Irwin notes, Hammett and Chandler play upon the...