Ray Pride

When it's hot, play it cool.

Laconic filmmaker and lying raconteur Howard Hawks loved that line, repeating it relentlessly in his later years. French nouvelle noirist Jean-Pierre Melville acted quietly on a similar impulse. He drew on the iconography of American gangster movies in work such as "Bob the Gambler" (on Criterion DVD) and 1967's "Le Samourai" (reissued in 1996, but not yet on video), and he's been a great beneficiary of the restoration boom brought on by the DVD format's profit potential. His twelfth, and penultimate feature, the epic of gangster manners "The Red Circle" (Le cercle rouge) "presented" by John Woo, graces the Music Box this week. It's courtesy of Rialto Pictures, which specializes in theatrical re-releases of movies like "Rififi," which Melville almost directed, "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and Jean-Luc Godard's "Band of Outsiders."

Melville's movies are hushed, deadpan abstractions of space and gesture, and his blunt, efficient cutting of shootout scenes are among the glories of precise, elegant filmmaking. Men with hats. Men with guns. In "Le Samourai," Alain Delon, perhaps that day's handsomest man on earth, swaddled in an immense trenchcoat, hiding deep blue pools of blankness under the brim of a fedora, stares out into the Parisian drizzle through a rain-blurred windshield, inserting keys from a ring until he finds the one that fits.

In "Bob the Gambler," a steel-haired, middle-aged, world-weary gambler comes up with the grandest con of his day while cruising the nightspots and fleshpots of backstreet Montmartre, but his moment of deepest melancholy comes from a single gaze upon the bare back of a young girl he's sheltered as she sleeps with his young protégé.

And a bald, stocky Jewish Frenchman, wearing a Stetson and sunglasses at night, barrels his Cadillac convertible down the Champs Elysee in search of diversion. Alain Delon in "Le Samourai," Roger Duchesne in "Bob the Gambler," the great filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville in life.

In "The Red Circle," three men are brought together by chance: prisoner Alain Delon, released to commit an intricate jewel heist; fugitive Gian-Carlo Volonte, who hides in Delon's trunk; and a former cop (Yves Montand) with demons to purge. Melville makes their motions quietly indelible, as well as the police, the police who police the police, and the criminals they all must consort with. (Melville even finds a role for his own three cats.)

In Rui Nogueira's long-out-of-print book-length interview "Melville," one of the most amusing oral histories of a filmmaker, the cinephile and director mused, "What is friendship? It's telephoning a friend at night to say, `Be a pal, get your gun and come over quickly,' and hearing the reply, `Okay, be right there.'"

"The Red Circle" provides a tersely played two-hour-forty-minute flowering of that sentiment. John Woo, admitting the kiss of debt that both he and other filmmakers owe Melville, nods toward its silence. Melville's visual style, restrained, refined, a palette reduced to essential colors and compositions, has been lifted and riffed upon by another connoisseur of the "beautiful loser," Quentin Tarantino. The first time I saw "Reservoir Dogs," I was astonished by the dexterity and cleverness of Tarantino and cinematographer Andrzej Sekula's paraphrase through choice of colors, use of space and framing, of the collaboration between Melville and his cinematographer Henri Decae, who shot "Samourai" and "Red Circle."

"There is not much dialogue," Woo has written of the film, "and the silence creates a more dramatic cinematic language. By creating a cool, calm atmosphere with immaculate camerawork and precise editing rhythms, his style and message move with his actors as they deliver their soulful performances." Claiming that he learned how to fire a gun and how to teach his actors from Delon in Melville's movies, Woo adds that Melville's themes "embody the spirit of honor, loyalty and tragic destiny among characters played by fate." The doomed romance of brotherhood: you can see why Woo loves Melville.

This cycle of homage is appropriate, perhaps, since Melville, an unapologetic admirer and collector of Americana and American crime movies, took much of his ethos from the gangsters and brooding tough guys in Hollywood pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. Melville and his characters were wont to mutter sour-sweet epigrams about trust and loyalty, like "If there are two of you, one will betray."

Working outside of French studio auspices, building his own facilities, often shooting on the fly on locations, Melville also provided inspiration to the French New Wave, and before that, as he often insisted, his spare style was taken by Robert Bresson. ("I say Bresson is Melvillian, not the other way around.")

"I don't know what will be left of me fifty years from now," he said in 1970. "I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and cinema probably won't even exist anymore. I estimate the disappearance of cinema... around the year 2020, so in fifty years there will be nothing but television. [I'll] be happy if I have one line devoted to me in the Great Universal Encyclopedia of the Cinema... I'm not ambitious, I don't want to be something; I have always been what I am, I haven't become anything; but I have always had this feeling that ambition in one's work is an absolutely justifiable thing."

In Godard's "Breathless," which homages "Bob the Gambler," there's also a cameo by Melville, as a pretentious novelist, asked by Jean Seberg, "What is your greatest ambition in life?" "To become immortal," Melville's character postures. "And then die." To be followed a couple months later by one of the inevitable, enviable, contemporary fetishes of a Criterion deluxe DVD edition.

"The Red Circle" opens Friday May 23 at the Music Box.

(2003-05-21)

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