BE KIND, REVIEW!

pabelbaba a écrit:Melville est mort il y a tout juste 50 ans.

J'apprends à cette occasion qu'il dinait avec Philippe Labro le soir de sa mort. On n'imagine pas tout le mal que ce bonhomme a pu faire...

This might be a controversial thing to say, but I find postwar French genre movies much richer and more real than the films of the French New Wave. It’s in the gangster films and thrillers where French cinema confronted all the bad things that happened under German occupation. France comes out of the war, and the New Wave starts to produce these films that don’t make any reference to history or the traces of the war that linger in French society. But that’s what these thrillers are all about. They explore honorable men operating in the criminal underworld as well as a very corrupt class of politicians and police who are treacherous and venal. These films are all about how much you can trust a comrade. Le cercle rouge is about the friendship between two guys—though maybe it’s a romantic relationship (it’s never made explicit)—and it contains a completely silent heist sequence that goes on for more than twenty minutes. There’s no sound in it, let alone dialogue! Alain Delon gives a virtuoso performance, one of his greatest. I could recommend any number of the French noirs by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jacques Becker, or Julien Duvivier, but Melville is a true artist, and Le cercle rouge is my favorite of those films.