When thinking about the present resurgence of the cinematic hitman, it’s difficult not to immediately think about the legacy of Jean-Pierre Melville. My thoughts on Melville’s impact on the stock character have been percolating through several critics’ mentions of the possible influences from Melville’s “Le Samouraï” on David Fincher’s “The Killer.” In Fincher’s homages, one can see Melville’s hallmarks: a fashionable brim hat, trench coat, and an existentialist outlook. Whether or not Melville directly shaped the characterizations of Richard Linklater’s hilarious “Hit Man” or Harmony Korine’s washed-up infrared “Aggro Dr1ft,” Melville left an indelible mark on the archetype that has been proliferated throughout film history.
Melville’s antiheroes (primarily in his noirs) are bathed in disciplines, morals, and strategies. They endure surveillance from authoritative and bureaucratic forces. To lead up to the 4K restoration release of his French Resistance classic “Army of Shadows” on August 2, Film Forum will host a 13-film “Complete Melville” retrospective filled with the director’s crime thrillers, adaptations of Francophonic literature, and World War II dramas from July 26 – August 1.
Born in a middle-class Alsatian Jewish family and with the surname Grumbach, Melville received a Pathe Baby camera for his birthday. Soon, he made a short film of his socialist father, mother, siblings, and home in Chaussee-d’Antin (his home for 16 years). It was in the moment “that I made my debut as a filmmaker and decided on my path,” Melville said in a 1970 interview with Variances. Like Cahiers du Cinema critics François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, Melville learned how to make movies by watching them. Until 1937 or 1938, he caught five movies a day. Film was his only interest as he would rather be in a theater “with a pocket full of diamonds” than be somewhere else for a day job, even after Melville’s brother Jacques and his wife helped him get a Diamond Deliverer gig following several errands from his job hunting. After Melville’s boss discovered his whereabouts, he was justifiably fired.
Melville soon hung out with gangsters he knew at the Saint-Lazare train station and befriended Paris’s “hoods” (e.g. high school dropouts). It was his relationships with a few gangsters, admiration for American gangster films, and preserving memories of a pre-war Pigalle that inspired Melville in leading France’s heist cinema. In Melville’s first foray into film noir (fourth overall feature), “Bob le Flambeur,” he hired actor Ruger Duchesne to play the eponymous anti-hero out of prison after the previously seasoned character actor was incarcerated for gambling debts. The down-on-his-luck Bob assembles a group of crooks to steal 800 million francs from a Deauville casino. Duchesne has an enlightening bounce as Bob in this “no[n-]pure policier, but a comedy of manners,” Melville’s words on the film. Still, its gleeful observation of luck and fate make it not as bleak as Melville’s later crime dramas. Bob gambles on horse racing bets but can’t always follow and build up his hot streak. With Melville’s signature jump cuts and unreliable narration, the film would become a box office hit and motivated French cinema’s next generation, Nouvelle Vague.
Americanophile is integral to Melville’s trajectory and his characterizations. When the French Resistance interrogated Melville in 1943, the past Resistance member told them that his last name was Melville, alluding to “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville, and not Grumbach. Because of his roots and passion for the mainstream, he infused and inverted Classic Hollywood rules (wipe cuts, fades, linear storytelling, etc.) into his films. It also contributed to his assimilation into the larger English world, where he wouldn’t have to face judgment for revealing his Jewish background. Inspired by Basil Dearden’s “Sapphire,” Melville’s next film was “Two Men in Manhattan.” It follows journalists Moreau (Melville in his only starring role just before his significant “Breathless” cameo as the interviewee) and photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset) solving the mysterious disappearance of UN French delegate Fèvre-Berthier. Filmed in studios in France with exteriors in NYC, Moreau and Delmas gathered intel from the Midtown building’s versatile tenants at a theater, hospital, and photo lab.
As an actor, Melville found himself to be “awful.” Grasset convinced him to play Moreau. Grasset recalled in the multilayered film school documentary “Code Name Melville” that Melville “did quite well” in his performance. The “amateur” Melville asserts lucid prescience in his Ray-Bans-less character. However, his French New Wave fanbase accused “Two Men” of being a work of American cinema. Melville objected that “No. I don’t make American cinema. One day, I’ll make an American film, and then you’ll see what it is.” “Two Men” engages with two cultures, and it is a dialogue about how they inform one another in diplomatic relations rather than a film that speaks solely to one country. “Two Men in Manhattan” is a criminally underrated puzzle that deserves to rank as high as “Bob le Flambeur” or “Le Samouraï,” the dazzling epitome of his minimalist caper films that inspired several action auteurs including but not limited to John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch.
Star Alain Delon re-tooled his image in his three collaborations with Melville. His first two performances were sinful men on the run in “Le Samouraï” and “Le Cercle Rouge.” In their final partnership (also Melville’s swan song), “Un Flic”(translated to “A Cop” in English), Delon plays the titular officer, stopping a potential train robbery unknowingly spearheaded by his friend Simon. Earlier performances have Delon elicited unaffecting faces in his crimes as he commits a hit gone wrong in “Le Samourai” and a jacked-up robbery in “Le Cercle Rouge.” In “Un Flic,” Delon instills fury into the character as he seeks justice through inhumane means. Critics at the time of its release derided “Un Flic” for its straightforward, incoherent narrative and demoting Catherine Deneuve to a stock love triangle player (Melville had very few nuanced depictions of women and femininity in his films with the noticeable exceptions of Emmanuelle Riva in “Leon Morin, Priest” and Juliette Greco in the sober melodrama “When You Read This Letter”). Besides the standout 16-minute opening and near half-hour train robbery that demonstrates Melville’s ability to lay out each individual element of a drawing into synchronous motion, “Un Flic” demolishes the striking betrayal of friendship (a common Melvillian theme). Melville’s outlaws seek humanity in people who aren’t their direct victims. They only commit the necessary killings to avoid making a sizable mess from their assignments like Jef Costello not eliminating Valérie in “Le Samouraï,” whereas recent hitmen like in “Aggro Dr1ft ” fixate on slaying anyone that is in their way to maintain employment and their status in their affiliations.
Contemporary hitmen, as seen in films like “Aggro Dr1ft,” “Hit Man,” and “The Killer,” aim for quick cutting, dialogue-heavy narratives, and character transformations. They try to outwit their targets and officers via several one-liners and different attires. Conversely, Melville’s gangsters are comfortable being themselves. They don’t put on a mask in their assignments. Instead, they amplify their cold-blooded stoicism when interrogated by inspectors as their faces have a thousand words and inhibit (explicit) anxiety about their dilemmas.
During the heavies’ chases from the police/their superior, as seen in “Le Samourai” or heists in “Le Doulos” and “Le Cercle Rouge,” Melville uses a molasses editing pace to get into the perpetrator’s psyche. He places the thrills in patient shot/reverse shot transitions in such sequences to change the perspectives of all parties rather than for the sake of getting coverage. When it comes to David Fincher and “The Killer,” he uses audible tonal shifts, like cutting to a different room and switching a range of audio levels depending on where the characters are to achieve this agenda. He oscillates between all the spaces where the murders took place, such as a less-than-a-second-long close-up of The Killer (Michael Fassbender) drilling into The Lawyer before cutting to Dolores (who’s held hostage) in a nearby room to inform audiences how the targets feel about being The Killer’s witnesses. Melville is mindful of the camera placement and commonly pans the action from a particular spot rather than a handheld tracking shot to give his characters privacy from onlookers. Melville’s tight yet effective editing options enhance his characters’ grounded perspective and force audiences to search for empathy for their callous actions from a distance.
As Melville’s executioners perpetuate society’s atrocities where the typical sound effect – a clock’s second-hand ticks – alerts their stamina and reorganizes their inventory, they use their forms of resistance to withdraw communication (commonly diegetic silence or a character undertaking such vow) from their nemesis. Silence provides beneficial and detrimental use as a weapon for assailants in all storytelling modes. It has fluidity in a Melville movie. For him, silence is a reliever for the characters’ harmful situations and a source of their precarity as a gun might come off in their non-tranquil environments. One moment it might be clear to exit the premises, in another a bullet might enter inside of you.
Mobile cameras and bugs are inescapable for the hitman. Their acts and words are more likely to be incriminated in our technologized world. Take daytime tech professor and evening undercover cop Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) in “Hit Man,” for instance. His colleagues record his every move – from the dubious Billy to sex symbol Ron – to arrest people making murder-for-hire confessions. Gary also uses silence as an alternative communication method. Posing as Ron, Gary tells his client-turned-romantic partner Madison (Adria Arjona) to play innocent over the police as they have evidence that she committed her death wish on her vicious spouse Ray via his phone. Gary’s nonverbal communication with her is a life-or-death ultimatum established by his bosses in this fan-favorite scene.
Considering the renewed cinematic importance of hitmen: “The Killer,” “Hit Man,” and “Aggro Dr1ft”– the Melville-devoted Film Forum (which previously hosted his re-releases and an earlier festival centering him) offers another sublime opportunity for first-watches and revisits on the independent stylist that encapsulates the phrase “less is more” with his nominal budgets. He puts that ethos into his practice and turns it into his case for earning the crown of coolness, explicitly wishing his audiences, in his “Variances” interview, “to leave [his movies] wondering.”
