RECOMMENDED
“Le doulos” is lesser-known Jean-Pierre Melville but far from second-rate. It’s a thrillingly weird and contrived caper about honor among thieves, with the authenticity of narrative consistency from an absolutely omniscient mastermind (whom we don’t recognize until late in the picture). Starring Serge Reggiani, dogged and with a mug like a rubbery fist, as a B&E man with bad luck, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as his facilitators, Melville’s 1962 policier revels in the contrast between the casual disrepair of apartments and bars, unimproved since forever, with the streets and nightclubs of Paris. Costumes burst from the screen: trench coats and wide-wale corduroy sports jackets. A moll in a wasp-waisted hound’s-tooth skirts and tall, gleaming, pointy black heels with toe cleavage, topped by stockings with seams. Small gestures mount: A hand trembling. A swaying lamp. A drawer with a gun in it opened with a cocked pinkie. Melville’s math adds up: dynamic angles, cuts, panes of light like blades. His great pleasure comes from showing men with boxer’s form, like Belmondo, his gestures while bound inside a trench coat, elongating his limbs just so to extract a smoke from a pack. Melville traffics always in preposterous cool, from design to actions to talk: “Your self-confidence is vexing,” a woman says, weary, meaning it, meaning impatience, meaning diffidence, meaning sex. (Ray Pride)
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