Alain Delon and Le Samourai
1.
The director of Le Samourai (1967), Jean-Pierre Melville, thought about the project for ten years. In the course of this gestation, Melville imagined Alain Delon playing the title role. Melville finagled an invitation to Delon’s home, brought the script with him, and began reading from it. After a while, Delon said: “There’s no dialogue for 7 ½ minutes. I’ll do it. What’s it called?” Melville told him that the title of the film would be “The Samurai.” Delon nodded and asked Melville to come with him to a locked room in the middle of his house. The chamber was empty except for a leather couch and a lance and samurai sword.
2.
The Anglo-American critic, David Thomson, in one of his books, writes that Melville’s The Samurai is a film so implacable and so relentlessly impassive, in other words, so tough that it seems comical. Thomson compares Delon’s mask-like beauty with Buster Keaton, the other great stone-face in cinema. It is certainly true that the film exposes a vast cleft or fissure between Delon’s elegant and ostensibly lethal assassin, Jef Costello, and his weirdly inept behavior. You can’t decide whether Delon is supposed to be a ruthless and efficient killer or a fool pretending to be a ruthless and efficient killer. Perhaps, we are meant to attend to both aspects of the protagonist’s personality simultaneously.
3.
The great French director Bertrand Blier describes Le Samourai in these words: “The Samurai (is) a completely bizarre film. There has been only one film made like this in France. And it’s so much like Delon, this film, a completely mute narcissistic role in which practically nothing happens. Delon sits in front of a mirror for an hour correcting the position of his hat. It has a lot of charm. It (is) a fascinating film. It (is) an extraordinary analysis of these two men, a formidable joint portrait of Melville/Delon.”
4.
Alain Delon who died on August 18 2024 was born on November 8, 1935. His father was a film projectionist who later owned cinemas. His mother worked in a pharmacy. When he was four, his parents divorced and, in the aftermath of their separation, the little boy was placed with a foster family. The father of that family was a prison guard and little Alain was traumatized by his foster-father’s vivid accounts of executions in the penitentiary where he worked. After a few years, Delon’s foster father died and, as a teenager, he was returned to his parents who shared joint custody. This part of Delon’s life was chaotic. He got into fights in school, beat up other kids, and was expelled. He was apprenticed to a meat cutter in a charcuterie and worked there, as a delicatessen assistant for three years. During this time, he engaged in petty crime, stole a motorcycle, and was involved in frequent bar fights. In his old age, Delon said that what he yearned for most in heaven was to be re-united with his mother and father as an intact family in heaven.
At 17, Delon joined the French Army. After training, he was sent to Indochina (Vietnam) and, in 1954, fought in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (where the French were decisively defeated). He was a bad soldier, insubordinate, and prone to theft and ended up with a dishonorable discharge. Delon returned to Paris where he dabbled in petty crime and seems to have been an apprentice pimp in Place Pigalle and Montmartre. He lived with prostitutes and met some show-people around the edges of the demi-monde. His beauty made him attractive to women and he ended up living with the actress Brigitte Auber who had worked with Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief. Auber took Delon with her to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. There he was courted by several producers including David O. Selznick. People in the film industry were impressed by Delon’s almost supernatural beauty and, after some false starts, he went to Rome and loitered around the edges of Cinecitta studios. Selznick, still courting Delon, offered him a contract in Hollywood if he would learn English. Delon, then, left Rome, returned to Paris, where he promptly began an affair with the wife of the well-known French direct Yves Allegret. This connection led to several small parts. (Delon seems to have forgotten that he was supposed to be learning English.) He continued to womanize and party; he was almost killed when he rolled a sports car in the St. Cloud tunnel.
Delon’s breakthrough occurred in 1958 (he was 23) when he was cast with Austrian actress Romy Schneider in a French romance Christine. (Christine is a remake of Max Ophuls Liebelei, a thirties picture that starred Schneider's mother.. Initially, Romy Schneider (who didn’t speak French) heartily despised Delon (who didn’t speak German). The feeling was mutual, but, as they say, opposites attract and soon enough the two were involved in a torrid love affair that catapulted Delon into the limelight at least in the tabloids. (Romy Schneider was, then, one of Europe’s most famous actresses.) The two were engaged but the love affair was too intense and tempestuous to survive and they were never married. (About ten years later, they reunited with much fanfare to do another film together, La Piscine, and, possibly, renewed the affair – they were called “the eternal betrothed” or the "mythical couple" in the press; they made another movie in 1972, The Assassination of Trotsky. ) Delon always maintained that Romy Schneider was the great love of his life.
By 1960, Delon was a major European movie star in his own right. He appeared as Tom Ripley in Rene Clements’ Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) a version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. He, then, worked with Visconti in two famous movies Rocco and his Brothers (1960) and later The Leopard (with Burt Lancaster in 1962). He acted for Michelangelo Antonioni in L’Eclisse also in 1962. For several years, he worked in Hollywood in mostly forgettable movies, playing “latin” lovers. By this time, Delon had married the actress Nathalie Barthelmy, renowned as one of the most beautiful women in the world. (She plays the role of Jef’s alibi witness in Le Samourai). People have remarked that Delon and his wife look like twins; they have spookily similar faces and bone structure.) Nathalie had a son with Delon. The couple divorced in 1969. Nathalie went on to have affairs with dozens of people including Louis Malle and Jessie Franco and was said to be “the muse” to the Rolling Stones.
Around 1968, Delon was involved with underworld figures again, Corsican gangsters. One of them Stefan Markovic, a criminal originally from Belgrade (Serbia), acted as Delon’s bodyguard. Markovic supplemented wages paid to him by Delon by organizing orgies in rooms equipped with hidden cameras. He used evidence of these sex parties, involving elite French officials and their wives, for blackmail purposes. Delon may have been involved in some of these affairs. (It was rumored that there were pictures of Delon involved in homosexual acts, an allegation that the movie star neither admitted nor denied.) Markovic wrote a letter indicating that he believed he was about to be killed and that, if this happened, Delon would be to blame. Around this time, Markovic was reputedly blackmailing Georges Pompidou, a politician who was campaigning (successfully) for president of the French Republic. Markovic was said to have compromising pictures of Pompidou’s wife at these orgies. Markovic’ was found shot to death in a garbage dump on October 1, 1968. One of Delon’s closest friends, Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican Mafia figure, was charged with the murder but charges were dismissed – the case remains unsolved. The pictures of Madame Pompidou never turned up and some believe that the blackmail rumors were scandal intended to oppose Georges Pompidou’s political aspirations.
Delon made more than a hundred movies. He worked for many of his era’s greatest directors including Jean Luc Godard with whom he made a movie called Nouvelle Vague in 1990. He appeared on stage and, after retiring from the cinema, appeared in a popular and long-running French crime show as Inspector Fabio Montale. As late as 2022, he was still involved in producing pictures – he interviewed Volodymir Zelenskyy in Ukraine in that year for French TV.
The actor’s final years were marred by accusations of abuse inflicted upon the old man by his children. These allegations involved protracted litigation initiated by his romantic partner, Hiromi Rollin against his children. This dispute resulted in a judicial guardianship enacted to conserve Delon’s estate. By this time, the actor was fabulously wealthy, having lent his name and image to Christian Dior, various perfume and clothing retailers, and, even, a brand of customized sunglasses popular in East Asia and made under the auspices of Delon and the Chinese action star (who idolized Delon), Chow Yun-Fat who wore the shades in John Woo’s famous thriller A Better Tomorrow. Delon also invested in real estate and promoted boxing matches. In the last couple years before his death, Delon was charged with possessing 72 firearms and cases of ammo -- notwithstanding the fact that he didn't have valid firearm's license.
Characteristically, Delon’s funeral was inflamed by scandal. In his Will, Delon specified that his beloved ten-year old Belgian Malinois, Loubo, be euthanized and buried with him on his estate. The French version of PETA and the Brigitte Bardot animal protection society intervened and the hound was spared. The funeral was conducted behind closed gates at Delon’s estate and said to be rather grotesque due to the obvious acrimony between Delon’s partner and his children. Cell-phones were collected at the gate and not returned to mourners until they had left the premises. The heat was oppressive and about a half-dozen people passed-out during the funeral Mass. Like Frederick the Great, Delon was buried alongside his dogs – over his life, he owned more than 30 Belgian Malinois. The Estate was said to be poor repair, dilapidated and the electricity is supposed to have failed several times in the hours before the ceremony.
5.
Jean-Pierre Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in 1917, the child of Alsatian Jews. His father was a rag-picker and recycled clothing. Melville studied American literature and worshiped Herman Melville. When he joined the French Resistance movement, he chose the name Melville as his nom de guerre and, then, continued using the name throughout his professional career. Initially, Melville was a member of the Communist party (an elder brother was a well-known Socialist journalist) but abandoned the cause when Stalin made common cause with Hitler by way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.
During the War, Melville enlisted in the French army and had to be evacuated to England from the beaches of Dunkirk. He returned to France where he joined the Resistance and was involved in a number of terrorist attacks. With the Gestapo in hot pursuit, Melville fled across the Pyrenees into Spain. He returned again to the Front as a member of the Free French army and fought at Monte Cassino in Italy among other battles. Melville’s brother was captured by the Germans and tortured to death, something that he didn’t learn until after the war. (This event has many echoes in Melville’s work, particularly in his signature film, Army of Shadows about the French resistance made in 1969, immediately after Le Samourai.)
Melville’s first film is a masterpiece, The Silence of the Sea, a love story shot like a Universal Pictures horror film. The movie is about a cultured German officer who is billeted with a French bourgeois family who have vowed to never say a word to this German interloper. The picture was made in 1947 - 1948 but released in 1949. Melville, then, directed a brilliant adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible premiered to great acclaim in 1950. The production of the movie was fraught; Cocteau had been a leading collaborator with the Germans and the two men clashed repeatedly on the set. Melville’s film noir Bob le Flambeur (1956) invented many of the practices that later characterized the French nouvelle vague (New Wave). Both Godard and Truffaut declared that Melville was their master – Melville appears in a bit part in Godard’s Breathless (1961).
Melville was a difficult man and he refused to cooperate with the French film industry. He founded his own studio in Paris and shot his movies there until a fire burned the place down in 1967. His first famous gangster picture was Les Doulos (“The Wolves”) released in 1962 and one source for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). Including Les Samourai, Melville made five crime movies, including the epic Zen-Buddhist heist picture La Cercle Rouge (“the Red Circle) released in 1970. All of his pictures originate in horrors that he experienced during the German Occupation and his movies all culminate in Army of Shadows, a harrowing picture about the French Resistance – it’s full of torture scenes and noteworthy for a graphic, and extended, murder sequence in the first half-hour in which Resistance fighters kill one of their own men suspected of collaborating with the Germans. Themes of loyalty, resistance, coercion and duress and radical uncertainty which play out in Melville’s crime movies (in particular) are all explored in terrifying depth in Army of Shadows. (The subject of the French Resistance is a particularly vexed and problematic subject in France and French movies and Melville is probably the greatest exponent of this subject.
Melville died of an aneurysm at 55 in August 1973. He was an admirer of Americans and America who wore a cowboy hat on his sets and drove a huge Cadillac with streamlined fins and hood ornament. As shown in Les Samourai (and many other pictures as well) he revered American jazz. Although not as well-known as he should be, Melville is one of the most influential film makers in cinema history. He is the “father of the French New Wave” as acknowledged by its masters. His influence on Robert Bresson is obvious and he has been admired (and his films cited) by Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog - Way of the Samurai), Tarantino, Michael Mann, John Woo and, even, directors such as Aki Kaurismaki and Nicholas Winding Refn. The John Wick cycle of ultra-violent action films repeatedly cite Melville’s films.
6,
Le Samourai is exquisitely shot in a nearly monochromatic palette of greys, very light scuffed blues and greens, with streaks of yellow suggesting sunlight in some scenes. The movie looks like a concrete block, heavy and impenetrable. Roger Ebert said the picture suggested to him the first light of dawn “on an ugly day.” The movie cuts unpredictably between scenes and sports a literary flourish in wipes that are almost all executed from left to right. As with Robert Bresson, the movie demonstrates an obsessive concern with showing how things are done in real time – if someone walks across a room or down a corridor, Melville typically shows us the entire action without cutting. The effect is to produce a documentary style sense of reality presented without edits and through shots of long duration that invite the viewer to carefully scrutinize the details of the image. The movie’s pacing is very deliberate. By modern standards, the film is extremely slow, with protracted sequences that are presented without montage and cutting. Actual duration is essential to the film – it depicts the last two and a half-days in the life of its titular assassin. The effect of the movie is one of relentless paranoid pursuit. The hero, Jef Costello, is on the run for most of the picture. Although the chase scenes occur across vividly depicted Parisian locations, the overall mood of the picture is one typical of film noir (and central to Melville’s war and resisaence movies): an overwhelming force of destiny bears down upon the movie’s characters and destroys them.
Several of Melville’s movies depict heist scenes filmed in long, silent takes. (Such scenes are central in La Cercle Rouge and Melville’s last picture Un Flic – that is, “A Cop”) Le Samourai contains several extended set-piece sequences, also shot mostly without dialogue. The film’s first 18 minutes is a nearly silent depiction of Jef’s plans to kill Martey and his execution of that crime – a weirdly flawed endeavor in which just about everyone in the night-club sees his face and, later, can be enlisted by the cops to identify the killer. The line-up sequence in which Valerie, the Jazz pianist (who has clearly seen Jef) inexplicably refuses to identify him is also protracted far beyond its narrative necessity – the scene runs for 18 to 20 minutes. Accordingly, the first half of the movie, about 47 minutes, takes place in a continuous sequence beginning with Jef’s resting in his one-room apartment with his caged bird (a symbol of the enclosed and imprisoning nature of the film and the destiny that it depicts), his preparation of this alibi, the murder, and, then, the line-up sequence which concludes when Jef returns to home-base, his apartment and the caged bird. There are two rigidly symmetrical sequences involving the removal of licenses on get-away cars that bookend most of the action – these episodes (each about two minutes long) are filmed with analytical rigor and are like scenes in an austere Bresson film. Another block of film is devoted to the pursuit in the subway – this is an eleven minute sequence. By this point, the movie has evolved into a double-chase, a narrative device most famously deployed by Hitchcock in several of his films – Jef is pursued by the police led by the indefatigable Commissioner (who acts like a Gestapo commandant in some scenes) and, also, by the gangsters who hired him to execute the hit on Martey. The film is laconic in the extreme: we are given no dialogue to explain why the gangsters want Martey killed; the relationship between Martey and Valerie is ambiguous and never explicated. I don’t understand the picture’s last five minutes. Do you?
Throughout the movie, Melville declines exposition and provides only a bare minimum of narrative information – the viewers are left to work out the relationship between the parties. We have no backstory as to the assassin. In fact, there is no backstory provided with respect to anyone. In Hemingway fashion, characters are defined by how they act. The film is an existentialist exercise par excellence, also a feature arising from post-war trauma as to the Resistance. No one has any essential character – the way that people act under circumstances of stress or duress (for instance, under interrogation) is all that matters.
The film grammar in Le Samourai is simple, basically two-shots cut together. There is only one conspicuous camera movement in the film, the last image dollying away from the bandstand in the nightclub after Jef has been gunned down. (There is another upward shot before the final image beginning with a low angle, somewhat heroic framing of Valerie that, then, resolves into a higher angle as the camera is moved upward. This is the film’s penultimate image.) I believe there are some hand-held camera shots, but they are mostly unobtrusive. As noted before, much of the film eschews editing to present action in real-time – for instance, when Valerie walks through the house where she lives with Martey (apparently), the camera follows her in real time: the sequence is about 90 seconds.
The film’s imagery and themes involve entrapment, betrayal, various mechanisms of surveillance, and a struggle against oppressive forces that have overwhelming resources to coerce and spy. This imagery is clearly an outgrowth of Melville’s experiences with the Resistance and would be foregrounded in his next movie Army of Shadows.
7.
Melville said that he didn’t show women in mini-skirts in Le Samourai because he wanted the movie to be set in an eternal dream-time. This is also why the men all wear fedoras or other types of hats. “I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic,” Melville said, “A film is first and foremost a dream...and it’s absurd to copy life... I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.” David Thomson, who reveres this film, says that the Jazz pianist is the figure of Death. She selects Delon when he sees her in another car in Parisian traffic. White and black signify death. (Jef puts on white gloves when he purports to menace the Black musician.) Valerie, Thomson thinks, is Death calling the already ghostly Jef, isolated and hermaphroditic, neither male nor female, to her realm.
8.
When Le Samourai was being shot Melville’s studio burned down. The director darkly hinted that this was intentional, arson by his enemies in the French film industry. At this time in his life, Delon (then 31) was tangled up in the Underworld again and had criminal associates. Possibly, these relationships were involved in the fire. But the truth has never been established as to why this fire happened.
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