Watching the movies of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose centenary is this year, is about watching the faces of men: impassive, immovable, inscrutable. They exist in a macho world where codes of dress and behaviour are hardly different on either side of the law. There are men in trench coats and hats and loosened ties, men bunched into cars on the way to or from a job gazing blankly straight ahead, men in nightclubs, their professionally bored expressions unaffected or even petrified more intensely by the drink, the cigarettes and the sexy dancers up on stage grinding through some quaintly choreographed routine (a classic Melville scene this, used in almost every one of his films).

His most famous picture is probably is the hitman study Le Samouraï (1967), with the exquisitely beautiful Alain Delon as the professional assassin, a man of mandarin detachment. There is a samurai code of blankness or emotional paralysis in many of Melville’s men, as if human emotions are an undisciplined expenditure of effort that should be conserved for the imminent kill. It often creates an almost Beckettian severity and sparseness. One of his eeriest scenes comes from his very last picture, Un Flic, or A Cop, released in 1972. Delon plays an officer called to a crime scene: the hotel room of a young woman who has been murdered. Melville doesn’t show us the body at first, giving us the procedural business of this cop tersely talking to the receptionist and other uniformed police. Then he gives us the victim’s face in startling profile, and then in closeup straight into her eyes. She doesn’t look like a corpse, but like an actress keeping perfectly still and directing her calm gaze into the camera lens. Melville cuts to Delon’s own gaze looking back into hers. It is as if they are both alive, or both dead.



That uncanny look reminds me of an earlier Melville movie, the crime drama Le Doulos, or The Stoolpigeon, from 1963. An ex-con called Maurice, played by Serge Reggiani, just out of jail, is chatting calmly to a fence, Gilbert (René Lefèvre), whom he suspects of killing his girlfriend while he was inside. Gilbert suddenly looks directly into the camera, and a look of terrible fear comes over his face; we understand without needing to be shown that Maurice has produced a gun and that Gilbert is about to die. Later, Maurice confesses that he had not in fact intended to kill him; it was this look that made him do it. The spasm of fear was an admission of guilt or just maybe a spectacle too disgusting or disturbing to tolerate.

Melville is celebrated as a poet of lowlife crime and a master of style, the creator of a Gallicised American tough-guy aesthetic taken from the 1930s Hollywood gangster movies that he adored. Well into the 50s, 60s and 70s, Melville kept creating criminals and cops in snap-brim hats and trench coats, long after it was realistically plausible to do so, until it became an almost surreal mannerism. It is no accident that one of his most famous on-screen acting appearances is as Parvulesco, the fictional writer being interviewed in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Melville was the epitome of a certain type of style worshipper. He gave you the tough guy with the gun and the girl – the two things that Godard said you needed to make a film.

But it was more than that. Melville’s attitude to lawlessness was crucially created by the second world war. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, he had been a fighter in the French resistance; he kept his codename “Melville” (in homage to Herman Melville) in professional life after the war, and never forgot a simple, brutal lesson about his countrymen: it was the rebels, the outlaws, the tough guys and the subversives who were temperamentally suited to be soldiers of the resistance. The instinct of the bourgeois law-abiding citizens – those obedient, nose-clean nine-to-fivers who just wanted a quiet life – was to collaborate with the Nazis. The criminals were the good guys.

He made two superb but very different films about the resistance: his crime-thriller war movie Army of Shadows (1969) and his discursive but no less brilliant debut Le Silence de la Mer, or The Silence of the Sea (1949). And Melville had a rather intense moral, and even religious side, a feeling for the crucified criminals either side of Christ, as shown in his remarkable film: Leon Morin, Priest (1961), in which his repertory player Jean-Paul Belmondo gave his best performance, playing against type as a sensitive, thoughtful priest with whom Emmanuelle Riva falls in love.

The Silence of the Sea, has a mystery, potency and subtlety that combine to make it his early masterpiece. The audaciously protracted dialogue scenes that make up the majority of the film are managed with superlative intelligence, and the sequence in occupied Paris – which Melville created just four years after the liberation – is really brilliant. It is something to compare with what Roberto Rossellini achieved in Rome, Open City. No less remarkable is Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles (1950), though it is obviously associated more with the author of the novel, Jean Cocteau, who had admired Melville’s first film.

It was a film he had to fight to make, using the moral authority he had acquired as a member of the resistance. Unlike many in the French cinema establishment, Melville had not been compromised by working within the collaborationist wartime industry. The author and resistance fighter Jean Bruller, who had published the original novel in occupied France under the pseudonym “Vercors”, had been persuaded that Melville was the man to bring his book to the screen.

The scene is the winter of 1941, just after the catastrophe of France’s capitulation. An old man (Jean-Marie Robain) and his beautiful niece (Nicole Stéphane) are living quietly in a country suburb. A German army officer has been billeted on them: Werner von Ebrennac, played by the Swiss actor Howard Vernon, whose gaunt face and staring eyes were later to make him a familiar player in horror movies. From the very first, it is clear that Von Ebrennac is no strutting, boorish Nazi. He is at pains to be polite, respectful. When in their home, he tries to appear to them not in his intimidating uniform, but in civilian clothes: a well-cut double-breasted suit, a casual jacket, even at one stage tennis whites and a racquet, although he never suggests a game. Von Ebrennac makes nightly visits to their front parlour and while the old man puffs on his pipe, and while his niece bows over her sewing, he speaks to them of his deeply felt Francophilia, and his great regard for France’s spirit, its culture, its national character and its literature: he speaks in flawlessly accented French.

Melville (right), with Richard Crenna and Catherine Deneuve, on the set of Le Flic (1972). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

But the point is that the old man and the niece remain utterly silent throughout – although we hear the man’s voice narrating the action. It is not that they are sending him to Coventry exactly. They do not make any great show of ignoring him, or slighting him. They allow him to hold forth, while they get on with their placid evening, which would not, in any case, involve much chat between the two of them. Werner accepts it, never goads them into replying, and never allows himself to feel annoyed.

Everything changes when he makes his longed-for trip to Paris, a city he has never visited and yearns to approach in humility, like a student. (Oddly, Hitler’s visit to Occupied Paris, which lasted just one morning, was said to have been intended in just this bizarrely delusional un-triumphal spirit.) Here, Werner’s idealism and innocence are shattered; he hears about plans for the Final Solution, and from his coldly brutal comrades in arms, he is brusquely informed that official intentions are to crush France, not to be a tender, masterful lover. He even realises that his well-intentioned civilised Francophilia is for everyone else a pose, an insidious tactic, deployed to trick the French into accepting their fate.

And resistance is the key. This is a key resistance text. Yet how does resistance manifest itself? Not in bombs or guns: although Werner is further sickened, on return to the village, to see that a dozen or so local civilians have been shot in reprisal for the murder of a German officer. No, the resistance of the old man and his niece takes the form of silence. Without this silence, Werner would not have felt compelled to fill the quiet with extravagant declarations of love for France and for German good faith, his disillusion would not afterwards have been so complete, and the moral villainy of the Nazi project would not have been so clear. It is silence that has drawn this German on to his destruction. If they had been friendly with him, Werner would have been drawn into the cynical contempt for the defeated French that the others feel, and so the old man and the young woman would have lost their crucial advantage. At the end, Werner reads a passage from Anatole France in a book that the old man has apparently left out for him to find: “It is a fine thing when a soldier disobeys criminal orders.” Is Werner going to mutiny? We shall never know.

The drama consists in the unfathomable enigma of the niece herself, played by Stéphane. We see her in profile, in half-profile, or quarter-profile, bent over her work. At one moment, we see just the back of her neck; but at another moment, we see her fingers trembling with secret emotion. She says just four words in the film. When she thinks that Werner is going to leave them, he says to her uncle: “Il va partir …” And finally, after he has revealed to them the terrible experiences of Paris she says to him: “Adieu.” And Melville gives a stunning closeup on her face, the beauty of which blazes out of the screen, like a sunburst. What has she been thinking and feeling about Werner all this time? Again, we shall never know.

No less remarkable is his Les Enfants Terribles (1950), although this is obviously associated more with Cocteau, author of the original novel. Elisabeth and Paul (played by Stéphane and Edouard Dermit) live in an obsessively close, quasi-incestuous – or perhaps just incestuous – relationship in their cramped Paris apartment after their mother dies. Bizarrely, Paul has been ordered to rest after fainting during a snowball fight at school; he collapses after being hit in the chest by a snowball (which may have had a rock in it) thrown by a malicious, fascinating troublemaker of a boy, Dargelos, played by Renée Cosima, who is also to play Agathe, the woman with whom Paul is later to fall in love and of whom Elisabeth becomes poisonously jealous, just as she may have resented Dargelos’s effect on him.

Obsessive ... Nicole Stéphane and Edouard Dermit in Les Enfants Terribles. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Stéphane’s performance is magnificent: a stunning explosion of crazed emotion, especially at the very end. She upstages Dermit a fair bit, but Paul has a potent moment at the point of death, when he sees his schoolfriends, the snowball-fighters who set him on this destined course of doom. And as for sex: this is another mystery. Elisabeth finishes the movie a married woman; she has to be married, of course, to be mistress of her late husband’s house. We are not shown the wedding. Did her American husband Mike (Melvyn Martin) depart for his fateful trip to the Riviera, where he was to have his fatal accident, without having a wedding night? Is Elisabeth still a virgin? Is her emotional bond with Paul still unbroken? Or is it that the wedding night was a disappointment? Cocteau and Melville embed these enigmas deep in the story, leaving only the festering, poisonous obsession.

There is also something to be said for Melville’s least-known movie, which came directly after this: Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre, or When You Read This Letter (1953), a commercial melodrama that Melville himself disliked and all but disowned. The letter of the title is the suicide note written by an innocent young girl, Denise (Irène Galter) who attempts unsuccessfully to drown herself after she is raped by the swaggering petty thief and womaniser Max (Philippe Lemaire) in a Cannes hotel room – the legendary Carlton, in fact. The letter is addressed to her beautiful but severe older sister Thérèse, played by Juliette Gréco, who has abandoned the convent where she was a nun, to look after Denise after their parents were killed in a car crash. Finally it is Max, this very same crook, using these very same words, who is to write a letter to an accomplice, whom he’s planning to meet up with in North Africa. But he announces he will have someone with him: Thérèse, with whom he has crazily fallen in love – a coup de foudre if ever there was one – after Thérèse had threatened him at gunpoint, demanding he rescue Denise’s honour by marrying her.

This movie has to be Melville’s most wildly improbable and absurd: a project he undertook as a director-for-hire. And yet it certainly has some of his trademarks, and has moments of power, like a brash Hollywood studio picture – the final railway station scene seems to be influenced by both Brief Encounter and Anna Karenina. It has the most gutwrenchingly realistic scene of someone getting run over by a train that I think I have seen in any film. And the film is serious about God, although serious in a preposterous way. The script is by the veteran screenwriter, director and author Jacques Deval, whose novel Marie Galante was made into a movie with Spencer Tracy. It is like a short story that Stefan Zweig might have written.

But it was the crime picture Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), in 1956, that would prove to be Melville’s great breakthrough. It is a stylish, gloomily witty picture about the criminals and gamblers in the Pigalle district of Montmartre, but it is transparently infatuated with the American gangster pictures of Bogart, Raft and Cagney. Melville’s movie begins with a leisurely tour of the city at dawn, as the denizens of the shadowy demi-monde saunter out into the daylight, having been up all night drinking, dancing, gambling and planning and executing robberies. Here is the bohemian glamour and dissident excitement of crime. They have a rough-hewn integrity and courage, and yet they have a banteringly intimate acquaintance with those cops sent to persecute them. Roger Duchesne plays Bob, a professional gambler with a Bogartian trench coat, hat and cigarette, who is compulsively playing down to his last cent. He is older than almost everyone he comes into contact with: an almost fatherly figure.

Desperate for cash, Bob conceives a plan to rob the casino at Deauville. He is supposed to be posing as a gambler, but on the crucial night he starts winning so much that a robbery is pretty much beside the point. Duchesne has the most extraordinary face: it isn’t that of a grizzled tough guy, like Jean Gabin whom Melville originally wanted for the role but couldn’t afford. Duchesne has a large, handsome, sensitive face, and blond-grey hair meticulously brushed and parted. He looks like an old-fashioned silent movie star, with makeup designed to emphasise his chin, cheekbones and great staring eyes. The final closeup is wonderful, when he relaxes and smiles for the first time, in the back of a police car.

Remarkably, Melville made just two films actually set in the US: the rarely-seen Two Men in Manhattan (1959) was the first, while the other was the George Simenon adaptation Magnet of Doom (1963). Two Men in Manhattan is the only time he directed himself: with a wig, his gloomy hangdog face has the look of a plump Victor Spinetti. There is a real visual fascination here: cinematographer Nicolas Hayer’s glossy night-time scenes of neon-lit Manhattan by night are tremendously good. The whole film has the up-all-night pallor of something by Jules Dassin or Robert Siodmak. It is fascinating to see Melville broodingly riding the New York subway, like a ruminative bloodhound.

The story unfolds on classic Melville lines, although these people aren’t cops or villains: they’re reporters on the trail of a sensational story. But they have the same callous attitude to women, who are there to be leered over, or glimpsed in a state of undress, either in bed or backstage at a club. They are also there to be slapped around, if necessary, and a lot of this style looks nasty and sleazy. Melville plays Moreau, a French news agency reporter in New York sent on a job by his editor to track down a UN delegate who has mysteriously gone missing. Moreau enlists the help of Delmas, a notoriously alcoholic and cynical photographer who has photos of this married delegate with all the women he has been brazenly squiring around town. Moreau and Delmas’s plan is to roam the city all night, trying to contact each of these women, trying to find a clue to the man’s disappearance. The missing man is in fact dead and when these two men in Manhattan break into the apartment where his corpse is to be found, Delmas starts rearranging the dead man’s body into a more obviously salacious and dramatic position to be photographed.

Melvlle was more obviously comfortable back on home ground. Le Doulos (1963) is a convoluted crime thriller clearly inspired by the classic Sam Spade pictures that winds up with almost as many bodies strewn about the floor as Hamlet. It’s a movie that confirms Melville’s stylish and fluent mastery of the genre, but also confirms a casually brutal and cynical attitude to women, who could be beaten up as a plot device. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a cool, self-reliant criminal who has made enough money to retire to an elegant house he has built in the country. But he is to be entangled in crime involving a recently released thief, Maurice (Serge Debbiani), and a corrupt club owner (Michel Piccoli) and he is suspected of being an informant, a “doulos”, due to his friendship with a cop.

Belmondo returned in Melville’s second “American” film Magnet of Doom (1963), and his battered, sensual, humorous face is now becoming a Melville signature. He is Michel, a young Franco-Italian tough guy, an ex-paratrooper and former boxer, looking for a job. He is hired as private-secretary to Dieudonné Ferchaux, played by Charles Vanel, an ageing shady plutocrat who likes Michel’s style. Dieudonné needs to escape France because he is wanted by the police for business irregularities and for having allegedly killed three black men in the Congo, where he had a rubber plantation. It is a mood piece, a character piece. Very little actually happens in the film, other than the ambience: seedy, squalid, aimless, listless, stirred by Michel’s discontent, boredom and sexual longing.

His next movie, Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), is best perhaps translated as The Second Wind or The Second Chance. It may even be a sly reference to Godard. The film is structurally very bold in that there is no conventionally central dramatic focus. Melville gives us two of the great faces of French cinema. One is that of Lino Ventura, who plays Gustave Minda, or Gu, the tough career criminal who breaks out of jail after serving 10 years for a train robbery that we see going wrong at the beginning of the movie. Ventura’s face is an implacable slab, made even more menacing by his occasional disguises of sunglasses and moustache. The second face is that of Paul Meurisse as Commissaire Blot, a classic French police chief. He is lean, worldly, shrewd and deeply cynical. His eyes twinkle with an almost priestly knowledge of other people’s sins. When he shows up to investigate a shootout, he derisively announces exactly how every single crook at the nightclub is going to claim they were not there, or that they saw nothing.

Melville’s Paris is here very different from the Paris of his New Wave comrades. However much he may sentimentalise and romanticise the underworld, his camera is here not especially entranced by Paris itself. Melville appears to shrug at its beauty. He is more interested in the faces and the tough guys as they slouch around the screen. He is, in fact, more and more interested in inactivity. As Gu waits on a deserted country road for the bullion van to appear with its police escort, we wait with him in what feels like real time. Like him, we stare at the ground and look at some ants. Later, while on the run for the second time, Gu hangs around with a bunch of aimless men playing boules. This is, after all, the Beckettian part of crime – doing nothing.

A killer with the vocation of a priest … Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Le Samouraï (1967) is Melville’s most famous film and certainly the most famous film of its star, Alain Delon, who plays a hitman with the ascetic solitude of a samurai. Like so many of Melville’s heroes, he lives alone with his drab maleness in a seedy Paris apartment: a real garconnière. Of course he wears the uniform of American movie gangsters and has an American name, Jef Costello – though it is Jef with just one F, a quasi-French modification.

Until the very end, when he appears nervous while stealing a Citroën with the vast ring of spare keys he carries at all times, Jef is icily calm. His clear-eyed beauty pours out of the screen. He is a pure killer, with the vocation of a priest – although of a very different kind to the warm and garrulous title character in Léon Morin, Priest. Jef moves around in a trance-like state, and that is how the movie moves around with him. It is as if, by 1967, Melville has inhaled something of Antonioni’s meditative calm, while also giving his killer a little of 007’s callousness and sexual allure. Jef goes out on a job. He has to kill that staple figure in thrillers, and certainly in Melville’s cinema, a nightclub owner. While walking up to the target’s office, he comes face to face backstage with a beautiful lounge singer and seems to mesmerise her with his unwavering gaze, before walking away and calmly plugging his victim. Perhaps he has somehow entranced her with his sleepy-eyed beauty.

Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) (1970), is another classic Melville underworld crime thriller, populated by men in hats and trenchcoats – a style of dress that is becoming almost surreal as time moves on. We see some women in miniskirts in a doorway and there is a plot twist that enables a cop to blackmail a criminal by fitting up his teenage son for drugs, a bogus charge that turns out to be true. In this way, Melville glancingly acknowledges the existence of a youth culture or drugs culture. But otherwise, it could be the 1950s or the 40s or even the 30s.

The title is a phrase taken from Krishna: the circle in which two men, fated by destiny to meet, come into contact. It is also a recurring motif – a wad of cash is smeared in blood; a pool cue is chalked in such a way as to create a red circle at the tip. Who are the men dragged together by fate? It could be two criminals or two cops. Incidentally, Yves Montand has a truly horrific “delirium tremens” scene – a staple of drama and TV from years gone by – in which he hallucinates spiders, lizards and rats crawling over his squalid bed, right up to his face. There is no digital fakery here. Montand really did have these horrible creatures swarming all over him.

Motif … The Red Circle. Photograph: Andre Perlstein/Publicity image

After this came Melville’s final crime picture and, in fact, his final work: Un Flic, another lowlife picture with a typically laconic performance from Delon, that squeamishly inventive crime scene and a great bank robbery in the driving rain. Melville died a year after releasing this, in 1973.



In the end, however, two of Melville’s war-set pictures are probably his best: Léon Morin, Priest (1961) and Army of Shadows (1969). The first is a war film that declines to conform to the usual narrative shape: the end of the conflict is an event that is quite as low-key as anything else. Emmanuelle Riva plays Barny, a young widow with a daughter in occupied France. Barny is a communist, and one morning decides to go to confession for no reason other than to indulge her leftist anticlericalism and to bait the priest. This turns out to be Léon Morin, played by Belmondo giving one of his best performances. An actor known for his gangsters and tough guys makes a brilliant priest: deeply intelligent, reflective, confident in his faith. This movie made me wonder if he should not have played Jesus.

Instead of being angry at Barny’s mockery, he calmly engages her in conversation. As their intense exchange continues, Melville brings his camera in close and often brings it around to the other side of them, crossing the invisible axis line between the pair so that Barny and Léon swap places on the screen – in the way that cinematographers are taught never to do. As a conversation, or an exercise in persuasion it is interestingly comparable to the entirely one-sided conversations that the German officer has in Le Silence de la Mer. And of course, Barny begins to fall deeply in love with Léon.

Set against all this, are the most piercingly strange and unsettling reminders of the outside world: life under Occupation. Antisemitic slogans are all about: Sabine’s family suffers, although antisemitic brutality is not explicitly shown on screen. A German soldier, desperately sad and homesick and about to be sent to the Eastern front, cuddles Barny’s little girl, pretending that he is with his own daughter. It is a poignant moment, quite innocent, and yet all the more macabre for that. Finally, the two tetchy old ladies who have been minding Barny’s daughter call on her and say: “We have come to see the shorn women paraded; make the most of the day.” Shaving the heads of women suspected of consorting with the Germans was a grotesque exercise in punishment – and a notoriously misogynist way for France’s menfolk to divert attention from their own far more serious collaboration. It is an intriguingly undemonstrative film and, unlike the crime movies, has a genuine interest and sympathy for women.

Army of Shadows (1969) is surely Melville’s most personal film. It is a war movie that looks like a crime thriller and, in fact, that generic ambiguity gives us the key to Melville’s attitude to crime and criminals. Resistance agents were – technically, at any rate – criminals. But they were people who had right on their side. Perhaps you needed an outlaw attitude, and not a reflexive, instinctive need to obey authority, if you were going to stand up to the Nazi occupation.

In Army of Shadows, Melville shows the sheer ruthlessness of the resistance. A key image from the film (often reproduced on posters) is that of the man tied to a chair, for brutal interrogation and torture by the Gestapo. But Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and the resistance are shown at the very beginning doing something similar to one of their own agents. In fact, they are going to execute him. And at the very end they are thrown into exactly the same dilemma when it becomes clear that another resistance fighter, Mathilde (Simone Signoret), is compromised, and have to convince themselves that Mathilde wants them to kill her.

There many extraordinary scenes in the film. The very first shot is of the Arc de Triomphe, held so still it could be a freeze-frame, were it not for some tiny and just visible birds behind it. Then we hear marching, the grim tramp-tramp-tramp of German soldiers’ boots. A military column circles in from the left of the screen and then round, towards the audience. There appear to be no crowds, no onlookers, it’s just the Nazis, as if in a bad dream.

Perhaps the strangest moment are Philippe’s thoughts as he is led to what he believes will be his execution. “The word ‘love’ has no meaning unless it applies to the boss,” he thinks, a poignant, desolate indication of how much of a soldier he actually is, how his loyalty is to his commanding officer, Luc. Then he has a brilliant line about how he can’t believe in death, even when it is at hand: “If I refuse to the bitter end, then I will never die.” And in fact, he does not die. He chooses to run, like a “frightened rabbit” – the cruel option given to him by the sadistic Germans – and were it not for that fearful capitulation, he would never have made it to the escape that his comrades have planned for him. Mysteriously, he is saved by his own failure of nerve, combined with physical readiness and recklessness. In its secular way, it is an operation of divine grace. It is a very Melvillian deliverance.

•Jean-Pierre Melville: Visions of the Underworld is at BFI Southbank 8 August to 10 September.