Synopsis
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.
Cast
| Jef Costello | Alain Delon |
| Superintendent | François Périer |
| Jane Lagrange | Nathalie Delon |
| Valérie, the pianist | Cathy Rosier |
| Man in the passageway | Jacques Leroy |
| Wiener | Michel Boisrond |
Credits
| Director | Jean-Pierre Melville |
| Screenplay | Jean-Pierre Melville and Joan McLeod |
| Producer | Raymond Borderie and Eugène Lépicier |
| Cinematography | Henri Decaë |
| Assistant director | Georges Pellegrin |
| Music | François de Roubaix |
| Production Design | François de Lamothe |
| Editing | Monique Bonnot and Yo Maurette |
Disc Features
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- New video interviews with Rui Nogueira, author of Melville on Melville, and Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris
- Archival interviews with Melville and actors Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, and Cathy Rosier
- Theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: a 29-page booklet featuring film scholar David Thomson, filmmaker John Woo, and selections from Melville on Melville
From the Current
Le Samouraï: Death in White Gloves
by Oct 24, 2005Tone and style are everything with Le samouraï. Poised on the brink of absurdity, or a kind of attitudinizing male arrogance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with that macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as we grow most alarmed. So the implacably grave coolness . . .
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What's your favorite Jean-Pierre Melville film?
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Le Samourai
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Is there a region 2 version?
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