Le Cercle Rouge is the the consummation of french-director Jean-Pierre Melville’s career. The 1970 film would not be his last, 1971’s Un Flic would be, but it was final great picture before his death in 1973. And ultimately, it was his most expansive, the one work that pushed farther toward masterpiece than any other in his esteemed career as prototype for the French Nouveau Vague in the 40s to his work as a neo-noir filmmaker with uniquely American themes and genre formulas.

The film opens with a quotation, presumably from a Buddhist sutra though actually a Melvillian invention: “Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: ‘When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle’.” The sentence structure is a little unfamiliar to texts of the orations of the historical Buddha and strikes one who has studied the teachings of Buddha as a definite fabrication. It is less Buddhism, than characteristic noir fatalism.

The film is heist film in which a small group of figures cross paths, as they meant to do as it were, and develop an idea to hold up a store specializing in fine gems and jewelry. Corey (Alain Delon), just freed from prison, visits his old boss, takes the money he his owed for doing time in his employ, and after killing one of his boss’ cronies, drives off in an new car through the countryside toward Paris. Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte) is a revolutionary or terrorist (the same thing defined differently through which party in political conflict wins in the end) who has been captured by the police and is being escorted by a supercop, Inspector Mattei (Andre Bourvil), to court for his case. He escapes and manages to circumvent a huge series of police road blocks by hiding in Corey’s trunk. Once they near Paris, Corey opens the trunk, knowing inexplicably that he has had a stowaway since his stop at a cafe earlier that day. The confrontation looks as if it could turn deadly, but eventually turns friendly as Corey tells Vogel that he too is a criminal, and shows him his release papers from earlier that morning. They team up, and Vogel re-enters the trunk, making sure to keep himself hidden from police.

Before they reach town, Corey is pulled over by more of his boss’s men who are ready to execute him. Just in time, Vogel exits the trunk and using the two handguns Corey had hidden a briefcase, eliminates Corey’s would-be killers. The bond is sealed and the two drive into Paris. Once there, the two add a third member to their party: Jansen (Yves Montand), an ex-cop who was fired for being unable to kick his alcoholism. He is a sharpshooter whose skills in the upcoming heist are necessary to its success, and the heist’s success necessary for Jansen to pull himself out of his DTs and back into a respectable frame of mind. Meanwhile, Mattei is on Vogel’s trail and by proxy, on everyone else’s as well. The heist goes off without a hitch, but the target was so high profile that their pre-established fence won’t take the goods. Mattei works with Santi, Corey’s old boss, as his inside man in the underground to find out who pulled the heist, and eventually Mattei presents himself as a fence, undercover.

The heist itself is an interesting phenomena. Coming in at almost half an hour long and in complete silence, the sequence mirrors Jules Dassin’ earlier heist sequence in 1955′ Rififi. Another famous heist sequence that Melville knew and liked was in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, a 1950 film noir that was a huge influence on Melville’s filmography. However, Melville envisaged his heist sequence in the same year as that film was released, in 1950, and he didn’t see it until 1951. When he did, he decided to put off making his own heist film. Then Rififi appeared and Melville waited another 15 years before he felt confident enough to create his own heist sequence powerful enough to stand on its own. Just as the characters circled around and met with their fates in the red circle, so too did the concept for the film’s core sequence circle around in Melville’s mind and alongside film noir classics for twenty years.

Fates sealed, all are within a circle, pre-ordained, and destined to meet and turn it blood red. Just as the great french filmmaker, Jean Renoir, before him, Melville liked to use strong quotations to sum up his film’s ethos and ethical-moral or metaphysical framework. Renoir’s most devastating and poignant came in his classic Rules of the Game, where he has a character say “Everyone has their reasons,” meaning that no one has evil intentions, everyone is a moral being, and hence, evil is something other than pure evil that most understand it as. Evil is banal, evil is following orders, evil is the consequence of interpretation of unwanted outcomes resulting from overwhelmingly good intentions. For Renoir, he has Mattei state that “all are born innocent, but it doesn’t last.” Everyone is guilty in the end and thereby no tragedy is undeserved.

Melville was the director’s birth name, he copped it from the inestimable Herman Melville, quite possibly the greatest American writer who ever lived. Melville was an enigmatic figure and a great man of french cinema whose importance in that medium may be just as protean and influential as Melville’s was and has been within his own. Melville wore a cowboy hat, aviators, and a trenchcoat. He watched American films and recognized the brilliance of American auteurs within the studio system before Andre Bazin and the theorists in Cahiers du Cinema who would become the French New Wave. He saw American cinema as both beautiful and extremely morally problematic, as both “the sublime and the abominable,” the genesis of some of the most beautiful films ever made and many which were the creations of auteurs with such powerful imprints that their visions and personalities came alive even through the crushing Hollywood system. But also a place in which racism and discrimination were rampant, a society in which lynching was common, with a history of genocide and slavery as its foundation, a beautiful, erupting society with an extremely dark shadow.

Le Cercle Rouge hints at France’s dark past of colonialism. It shows the dark underbelly of French society, a criminal base that is always there, waiting to erupt out into the open air. Or at least an imagined base that Melville found interesting, or even inevitable. The film is large, sprawling, more than two and half hours. The man who made it was likewise enigmatic and complex, too large a figure to sum up in any number of words. Protean. And like that other great American writer, Walt Whitman, both the film and its creator certainly contain multitudes. Multitudes I will most certainly be interpreting and peeling back for years to come, if not the rest of my own life, however amorphous and undefined at this early period it happens to be (and I mean that with regard to both referents). [Not quite Derridean, but I may be moving in on something close to it yet]