Jean-Pierre Melville, My Father in the Art

One finds traces of this American cinema in Melville’s films: Bob le flambeur is a friendly, relaxed homage to The Asphalt Jungle, without the moral tragedy, while the plot of Le samouraï is inspired by that of This Gun for Hire (the cat is replaced by the canary). Melville also loved Odds Against Tomorrow, which was constantly being screened at his film studio (I saw it with him eleven times). He had the wallpaper of its hotel rooms reproduced both in Léon Morin and Le doulos, and closely imitated the series of shots and camera movements in the waiting sequence that precedes the film’s holdup. I was with Melville at the Triomphe theater when he discovered André de Toth’s The City Is Dark (a.k.a Crime Wave), which we saw twice. He would twice pay tribute to this remarkable film noir, with the toothpick chewed on by the detective in Le doulos and the broken cigarette Paul Meurisse pulls out of his pocket at the end of Le deuxième souffle.

While the political gravity of his life in the Resistance and the thrills of American genre filmmaking may seem like contradictory influences, they are peripheral if not superficial, and they in no way compromise a body of work striking in its coherence, consistency, and unity of tone and style. It is as if Melville managed to unify his sources of inspiration, to rid them of any superfluous elements, through visual rigor, dramaturgical sobriety, and narrative economy. No patriotic tirades, no ostentatious declarations here, but a restrained, stripped-down plot, which benefitted from the economy of Melville’s means of production. He produced his first films on a shoestring: Le silence de la mer is basically a single-set film, shot in the Studio Jenner, which he had just founded in 1947, and in real outdoor locations, with a bare-bones crew that outraged contemporary unions (in this respect, he was anticipating Steven Soderbergh). In subsequent projects, I saw him manage to create a beautiful set with two flats, a few props, and an inventive use of light. In my documentary My Personal Journey Through the French Cinema—in which I describe my first encounter with Melville for the interview that would lead to our friendship and, several months later, my appointment as his third assistant director on Léon Morin—I show how each of Melville’s films finds him reusing the door to his studios, whether as the entrance to nightclubs in Le samouraï and Le deuxième souffle or to a New York building in Two Men in Manhattan. You can also spot the staircase at the back of the big soundstage at Studio Jenner in nearly all the films he directed.

Melville’s style diverged from the American movies he loved in crucial ways. Of the American influence, Melville keeps neither the enthusiasm and momentum one feels in Walsh’s films nor the warmth dear to Ford and Capra. Here, too, he privileges the clean, minimal style Wyler favored and the pared-down approach Wellman adopted in The Ox-Bow Incident. He focuses his dramatic structures on a few obsessions such as betrayal (in the Resistance films), apparent commitment to promises made, and solitude. Like the filmmaker himself, the Melville hero lives in a room without windows (or with a cramped view, like Delon’s in Le samouraï). Melville often goes against Hollywood principles, as with the drawn-out length of his shots, the importance of silences, and especially his rejection of omnipresent music. He often had problems with his composers, rightfully rejecting Michel Legrand’s score for Le cercle rouge (Eric Demarsan’s score is a better fit) and John Lewis’s for Le deuxième souffle. Someone should try to find Lewis’s score: what I’ve heard of it shows that he refused to imitate what he had done for Odds Against Tomorrow. But in all the films, one remains struck by the intelligent parsimony with which Melville uses music.

Another violation of a Hollywood code: the refusal to use certain explanatory reverse shots. In Le doulos, Serge Reggiani is burying something near a streetlight. He hears footsteps and stops. The steps fade into the distance. In any American film, the studio would have forced the filmmaker to show this passerby. But Melville stays on Reggiani and creates an incredible tension by explaining nothing. From a vigorous, tumultuous cinema full of sound and fury, he invented dark, morose worlds, with characters who seem on their last legs, imposing a tone close to that of Robert Bresson. Le doulos, Le deuxième souffle, and Le samouraï are undeniable successes. While I admire the acutely intelligent way in which he adapted the novels he selected, I find his original screenplays—Two Men in Manhattan, Le cercle rouge, Un flic—more conventional, perhaps even simplistic. There is one out-and-out failure among the adaptations, Magnet of Doom, in which Melville tones down and betrays Simenon’s novel and bungles the entire American part. Perhaps it was better to dream America than to film it. 

Melville was also a real tyrant on the set, terrifying me throughout the shoot of Léon Morin, Priest before convincing his producer to take me on as a publicist. In life, though, he was a warm raconteur who dragged you around Paris recalling a thousand memories. 

I had wanted to be a director since the age of thirteen, and both Melville and Claude Sautet went to see my parents, who wanted me to study law and politics, to tell them they should let me work in film. Melville was a surrogate father with whom one fell out the better to reconcile. Happy are those who got to know Studio Jenner.

Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott.

The Complete Jean-Pierre Melville is available to stream on the Criterion Channel through February 29, 2020.