Le Samourai (1967) Alain in the Underworld (Review)

Criterion delivers Alain Delon’s most iconic performance to Blu-ray this week with the release of Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic, Gallic ode to ’40s US gangster movies, Le Samourai. In what is arguably his greatest role, the impossibly handsome Delon stars as as assassin-for-hire Jef Costello. Dressed in trenchcoat and a deeply cool fedora whose brim must always be just so, Costello lives alone in a shabby and sparse Parisian apartment with only a bullfinch for company and follows the ancient code of the Bushido favoured amongst the samurai in Japanese society.

Meticulous about his job, Costello carries out what appears to be another flawlessly planned hit on a nightclub owner at the start of the film – only to find his getaway observed by several witnesses, chief among them the enigmatic club pianist Valérie (Caty Rosier). Hauled to the police station, Costello is confident that an airtight alibi provided by his mistress Jane (Nathalie Delon, the star’s wife at the time) will overcome all obstacles to his freedom. But he hasn’t counted on François Périer’s doggedly persistent police Superintendent, nor the client who hired him for the hit and who now wants him dead. His only hope comes from an unexpected quarter when Valérie lies to the police and claims he was not the man she saw leaving the scene.

A committed Americanophile (took his name from Herman Melville after reading Moby Dick) Jean-Pierre Melville is renowned for combining US culture with his own distinct European sensibility to create some of the most landmark films in French cinema history. His minimalist, existential noir storytelling slowburned its way onto the screen throughout the ’50s and ’70s, culminating in a trio of movies starring Delon; Le Samurai, 1970’s Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic in 1972. One of the many interesting things about these movies is the way in which Melville casts his actors. For example, Périer plays the policeman here, but went on to play a criminal in Le Circle Rouge, whilst Delon switched sides from the underworld to the thin blue line as the eponymous Un Flic, Melville’s final film. The fact that I referred to sides there is wholly intentional, as it’s my belief that Melville viewed the protagonists of the crime genre as rival factions for whom life could have been very different if they’d gone a different way. Beneath their trenchcoats and the blue fug from their ever-present Gauloises or Gitanes, they’re not so different. This is an especially effective approach in Le Samourai, which sees Delon’s freelancer being hunted down by the organised forces of both the underworld in the shape of his client Rey (Jean Pierre-Posier) and his enforcer (Jacques Leroy) and by Périer and his officers of the law. That sense of isolation, of being a loner and alone, that gives weight to the film’s title, is therefore not just apparent in Costello’s personal code, but in his eventual predicament too. America of course, didn’t get that, releasing an English dub five years later under the ludicrous title The Godson, suggesting not only a cash-in to Francis Ford Coppola’s gangland epic The Godfather but towards familial ties and a belonging that Delon’s (anti)hero simply does not possess.

It’s wholly fitting that, for a film about a man who deals in death, Le Samourai possesses an unmistakable funereal air. Melville’s regular cinematographer, Henri Decaë, shoots the rain-soaked streets of late 1960s Paris with colours that are as muted as the personality of our protagonist, a solitary man of few words who lives by action alone. The decision to shot in such pale, mono tones not only evokes the golden age of the American gangster movie, but serves to provide a sobering sense of portent within the viewer as he or she watches the events unravel. There’s a sense of Costello’s inevitable fate that lingers on every frame and indeed it is apparent right from the opening, which sees him captured in the twilight, almost ceremoniously laid out on his bed as he idles the time before his hit – a man without purpose when he is not working.

Though his commitment to his task borders on the fanatical, it is clear that the mistake he makes of letting the witness walk, will be his eventual undoing. How Melville chooses to get there, however, and how complicit he makes Costello in his own fate, is the masterstroke of Le Samourai. Personally, I find it a shame that his original intention, to afford the stony-faced Costello, this angel of death, a beatific smile in death, was scuppered by the fact that Delon had performed just such a juxtaposition in an earlier film. But that’s a minor gripe in an otherwise stylishly elegant and deeply engrossing neo-noir.

The Criterion release includes some interesting extras including two interviews with Melville scholars, Rui Nogueria and Ginette Vincendeau, a collection of archive interviews from the ’60s and ’80s from the main players, a documentary exploring the collaborations between Melville and Delon and the inevitable trailer and booklet.

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THANK YOU FOR READING MARK’S REVIEW OF LE SAMOURAI