Jean-Pierre Melville

Léon Morin, Priest

Léon Morin, Priest

Jean-Paul Belmondo delivers a subtly sensual performance in the hot-under-the-collar Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The French superstar plays a devoted man of the cloth who is desired by all the women of a small village in Nazi-occupied France. He finds himself most drawn to a sexually frustrated widow—played by Emmanuelle Riva—a religious skeptic whose relationship with her confessor turns into a confrontation with both God and her own repressed desire. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of French cinema’s towering virtuosos.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1961
  • 117 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #572

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • French television interview with director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo from 1961
  • Selected-scene commentary by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • PLUS: A new essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana and excerpts from Melville on Melville

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • French television interview with director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo from 1961
  • Selected-scene commentary by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • PLUS: A new essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana and excerpts from Melville on Melville

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
Léon Morin, Priest
Cast
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Léon Morin
Emmanuelle Riva
Barny
Irène Tunc
Christine
Nicole Mirel
Sabine
Gisèle Grimm
Lucienne
Monique Hennessy
Arlette
Credits
Director
Jean-Pierre Melville
Producer
Georges de Beauregard
Producer
Carlo Ponti
Based on the novel by
Béatrix Beck
Adapted by
Jean-Pierre Melville
Cinematography
Henri Decaë
Editing
Jacqueline Meppiel
Editing
Nadine Marquand
Editing
Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
Original music by
Marital Solal
Original music by
Albert Raisner (harmonica)
Art direction
Daniel Guéret
Assistant directors
Volker Schlöndorff
Assistant directors
Luc Andrieux
Assistant directors
Jacqueline Parey

Current

Léon Morin, Priest: Life During Wartime
Léon Morin, Priest: Life During Wartime
To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh in…

By Gary Indiana

Rachel Kushner’s Top 10
Rachel Kushner’s Top 10

The author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers shares a selection of her favorite films, including masterworks by Altman, Sembène, and Pasolini.

From the Melville Archives
From the Melville Archives

On the ninety-ninth anniversary of Jean-Pierre Melville’s birth, we’ve gathered a selection of essays, photos, and videos that showcase the best of the iconic director’s varied oeuvre.

Richard Hell’s Top 10
Richard Hell’s Top 10

Richard Hell was a founding member of the early CBGB bands Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. His Voidoids album Blank Generation (Sire, 1977) is generally acknowledged as seminal to “punk.”

Explore

Jean-Paul Belmondo

Actor

Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo

When you’re talking about French New Wave cool, it’s Jean-Paul Belmondo who first comes to mind. There are other male icons of the era—Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud—but with his casual sexiness, cigarette-smoking swagger, and boxer’s mug that only a mother (or actually, as it turns out, everyone) could love, Belmondo stands alone. The son of a famous sculptor, he worked successfully as a comic stage actor for a few years before Jean-Luc Godard cast him in his 1958 short Charlotte et son Jules; during the production, Godard promised the young actor the lead role in his first film. In 1960, Breathless hit: its impact was, of course, seismic, and so was the force of the actor’s breakthrough. In Michel Poiccard, Belmondo created a rapscallion antihero for the ages, couched by Jean-Luc Godard in both romanticism and reality, as though a demigod in a documentary. Superstardom followed fast on the film’s heels. In the early sixties, Belmondo would alternate between New Wave art films (working with Godard again in A Woman Is a Woman and Pierrot le fou) and gangster pictures that showed off his effortless tough-guy bravado (Classe tous risques, Le doulos). Soon enough, he was one of France’s most bankable stars, embarking on a career making comedies and action movies that has already spanned a half century and is still going on.