America’s rediscovery of French director Jean-Pierre Melville hit a new peak last year, when his Army of Shadows showed up on more than 30 Top Ten lists – including number one mentions from the likes of David Ansen, Manohla Dargis, and Scott Foundas – nearly four decades after it was made. Now we get the reissue of his 1962 hit Le Doulos, a more characteristic gangster film, featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

After a few opening screens of text explaining that “doulos” is underworld slang for a police informant, we meet Maurice (Serge Reggiani, whose striking resemblance to Rowan Atkinson retroactively hurts his performance), a weary crook fresh out of the slammer. He visits his old pal Gilbert (Réne Lefèvre), who is fixing him up with a heist. Gilbert looks askance at Maurice’s mention of getting some help from his friend Silien (Belmondo): A lot of people think Silien is a snitch.

Maurice ends up doing the job, but things predictably go awry. Someone has clearly tipped off the cops. Was it Silien?

Melville was enamored of American movies, and Le Doulos tips its hat – “hat” is another meaning of “doulos,” and both Maurice and Silien are rarely seen without one – to the granddaddy of Hollywood caper films, The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Melville also cited Robert Wise’s 1959 heist film Odds Against Tomorrow as a major influence, which may explain why he had Paul Misraki write a jazz score that is a blatant knockoff of John Lewis’s memorable music for the Wise film. (Indeed, Melville hired Lewis to write the score for a later feature, but it wasn’t used.)

While Le Doulos has the dark worldview of other Melville gangster movies like Bob le Flambeur – and even darker cinematography – it’s also way more intricately plotted, almost off-puttingly so. The way Melville presents most of the story encourages multiple interpretations … actually, multiple misinterpretations.

To his credit, he plays fair by letting us know in the very first sequence that we make assumptions about these characters at our own risk. Within the first half-hour, there are two shocking moments where we suddenly have to reevaluate what’s going on.

But, near the end, the director presents a series of brief flashbacks that fill in missing details crucial to our understanding. It’s a clunky device, and it verges on violating one of the cardinal rules of good faith with the audience – the same rule I trashed War for violating only last week (see “Ping Pong Phooey,” Aug. 30).

I’m not just going easy on Melville because he’s, you know, French … and dead, to boot. Repeated viewings reveal that he covers himself pretty well against such charges. (There’s no way to discuss the details without giving away plot points, so I’ll have to be vague.)

When Melville “misleads” us here, it never – with one arguable exception – involves a character whose p.o.v. we’re supposed to be sharing. We’re never led to believe we’re inside the person’s head; we’re always standing at a distance, guessing his motivation. (In War, on the other hand, we learn at the end that the protagonist has a secret motivation not even hinted at – one that totally negates his moral position.)

The other interesting wrinkle that saves the final big revelation from being infuriating is that, as in The Usual Suspects, there is no internal reason to believe that the information in the flashbacks, presented by an unreliable narrator, is true. There is only the external reason of genre convention: In crime films, the big explanations at the end traditionally tie things up neatly. In fact, what we see is carefully selected to allow the opposite interpretation – a possibility Melville suggested in interviews.

Even if you’re not a fan of this sort of narrative trickery, it must be said that Le Doulos is simply a hell of a thriller: I was exhausted and ready to fall asleep when I started watching it, and it perked me right up – which happens far less frequently than one would hope.