Jean-Pierre Melville

Biography: life and films

The Master of French Film Noir

Jean-Pierre Melville has been rightly hailed as the father of the French gangster film. Certainly, his moody thriller offerings are the films for which he is best known, on a par if not better than anything which Hollywood has given us. Yet the world of the anonymous gun-toting hoodlum occupies only a part of his oeuvre. There is far more to Melville's crepuscular world than first meets the eye.

The one unifying theme in Melville's films is not crime, it is loyalty to one's comrades and a respect for a self-imposed code of honour. This is as apparent in Les Enfants terribles (1949), a story (taken from a novel by Jean Cocteau) about a near-incestuous relationship between a brother and sister, as it is in Le Samouraï (1967), his most famous film. The same theme underpins the slick heist thriller Bob le flambeur (1955) and the wartime drama L'Armée des ombres (1969). This notion of loyalty and honour appears to be very much part of the Melville psyche and almost certainly derived from his involvement with the French Resistance during the Second World War.

The man in question was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, in Paris on 20th October 1917, into a Jewish family living in Alsace, France. He was a keen cinema enthusiast from an early age. When he was unable to follow the traditional path to become a film director, he set up his own film production company in 1946, with a studio in Paris. An admirer of American culture, he adopted the name Melville from his favourite author, Herman Melville, most famous for his 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

Melville began by making low budget films which used extensive location work, becoming the inspiration for the French New Wave film directors of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His first feature, Le Silence de la mer (1949), a bleak drama set during the Nazi Occupation of France, was enthusiastically received by the critics and led the writer Jean Cocteau to invite him to direct his adaptation of Les Enfants terribles.

1955 saw Jean-Pierre Melville's first excursion into the shadowy world of the gangster. Taking his inspiration from American film noirs of the preceding decade, Melville creates a distinctive, minimalist brand of noir which he would perfect in his subsequent thrillers, Deux hommes dans Manhattan (1959), Le Doulos (1962) and Le Deuxième souffle (1966). These films represented the best of the policier, a genre that was phenomenally successful in France in the 1950s and '60s. They also had a significant influence on the directors of the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard openly acknowledges his debt to Melville by giving him a cameo role in his first feature, À bout de souffle (1960).

In 1961, Melville directed another notable wartime piece, Léon Morin, prêtre. Starring Jean-Paul Belmonda an Emmanuelle Riva, this intense drama involving a Catholic priest and a woman admirer won Melville great critical acclaim and established him as a serious director. In the same year, he made Le Doulos (1961), a now classic French gangster film which gave Belmondo one of his most iconic roles.

Even in Colour Everything is Noir

Jean-Pierre Melville directed his most well-known film, Le Samouraï, in 1967. This sublime noir masterpiece is quintessential Melville, representing the distillation of his technique (with a remarkable eye for detail) and his philosophy (honour before everything). With France's coolest and most charismatic actor Alain Delon inhabiting the lead role with uncanny ease, the film was popular on its first release and remains one of the landmark films of French cinema.

Melville's next film, L'Armée des ombres (1969) drew heavily on the director's war time experiences in the French Resistance. A poignant drama with a strong performance from a remarkable cast that includes the great Lino Ventura, this is among Melville's finest achievements.

In 1970, the director made what some regard as the ultimate French crime thriller, Le Cercle rouge, a classic gangster movie which brought together no less than three acting legends of French cinema - Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Bourvil.

Melville's final film, Le Flic (1971), was not a great commercial success. Another stylish gangster film, this one had Alain Delon cast against type as the resourceful cop rather than the icily aloof crook. Despite some production weaknesses and a lethargically paced plot that revels in cliché, this is one of the director's most beguiling films - a hauntingly lyrical film peppered with some remarkable cinematic flourishes.

On 2nd August 1973, Jean-Pierre Melville died in Paris from a heart attack whilst working on his next film. He was aged 55. In a career spanning 25 years, the director had completed only thirteen full length films, but most of these are now widely regarded as some of the great triumphs of French cinema. Nobody made gangster films better than Melville, and his work continues to fascinate and inspire noir enthusiasts in every corner of the world.

Filmography

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