Le Doulos":
Birth of the cool, Parisian style

There certainly were French crime films before Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 "Le Doulos," [Film Forum] and plenty more got made later, but you can make a pretty good argument that the genre never got any better. From the opening sequence -- a long tracking shot in which we watch Maurice (Serge Reggiani), the archetypal noir hero in trench coat and hat, rap-rap-rapping down a side street of Montmartre as an intertitle demands, "One must choose: To lie ... or to die?" -- it's a masterful blend of black-and-white economy and style.

This isn't a rediscovered film, at least not in the sense of last year's release of Melville's "Army of Shadows," which had hardly been seen in the United States. By contrast, "Le Doulos" -- the title refers to period Parisian slang for a police informant -- is pretty well known. Its combination of the hard-boiled aesthetic of 1930s American film with postwar French existentialism -- and a frankly fetishistic attitude towards men's fashion -- remains immensely influential. Without "Le Doulos" and Melville's 1967 "Le Samouraï," you don't quite get "Reservoir Dogs" or "Oldboy" or John Woo's classic Hong Kong films.

This release of "Le Doulos" (from Rialto Pictures) comes in a marvelous new print with new English subtitles, and it deserves a wider viewership than it's likely to get. On the surface this film is the story of Maurice, an embittered, emotionally crippled ex-con, and his ambiguous relationship with a pal named Silien (the great Jean-Paul Belmondo, lizard-slick here), who may or may not be the "doulos" of the title. But the more you see this film, the more you realize that it's no clearer than Howard Hawks' infamous screen version of "The Big Sleep." Maurice is a scumbag who kills and robs his closest friend, and the debonair Silien may be double-crossing Maurice, double-crossing the cops or simply lying to himself. (Don't miss the dazzling 360-degree panning shot, nearly nine minutes long, during Silien's police interrogation.)

For some years there was a critical consensus that Melville's films were misogynistic, but you might call that a false epistemology. He's depicting a profoundly misogynistic world in which women are ordered around, casually beaten, and tortured or raped when it's useful to do so. That doesn't mean he's endorsing those values, and as Melville made clear in interviews, it doesn't follow that Thérèse, the femme fatale played by Monique Hennessy, is necessarily guilty of the treachery of which Silien accuses her. It might be accurate to say that Melville's world is homosocial or borderline homoerotic, and that women just aren't important figures in it. He gets that, of course, from the American movies that obsessed him.

Melville once joked, "I take care never to be realistic," and it's true that "Le Doulos" makes no effort to portray the authentic criminal underworld of 1960s Paris. Its characters are suspended somewhere between American tough guy and French romantic hero, the bars look more like Manhattan dives than Parisian bistros, and Melville even insisted that his sets have sash windows with Venetian blinds (rare in Europe but common in American film). This film is as much a commentary on the moral and spiritual Americanization of Europe as anything Jean-Luc Godard ever made. Since it's also a slippery, gripping cops-and-robbers thriller, full of twists and turns and ending with a tragicomic shootout you'll never forget, it's about 20 times more enjoyable.