Le Samouraï (1967) - The Criterion Collection

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 David Thomson Oct 24, 2005

Tone 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 . . .