• Le Samouraï

7/17/22 (Sun)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 take on a noir thriller. Alain Delon plays a cooler-than-cool killer-for-hire, dapper in his trench coat and stylish hat, who plays a cat-and-mouse game with the police after his murder of a nightclub owner. He is a taciturn type who lets his gun do the talking and has carefully set up alibis before carrying out the job, but he is spotted by a witness, a jazz singer in the club, upon leaving the scene. He refrains from killing her and quickly leaves, and she responds by denying to the police that this is the man she saw. Contradictory evidence complicates the picture for the police, but the noose eventually tightens. Delon moves ultimately to fulfill a final contract, which involves killing the singer. He goes to the club in a tense scene for a surprising ending.

A better title for the film would be “Le Yakuza”. Delon’s actions are not the behavior of a samurai, who is devoted solely to his master and would never stoop (at least ideally) to monetary gain. Delon is beholden to no one and lives what appears to be a solitary life. He does have a devoted lover, but she in turn has a wealthy patron (who Delon makes use of as one of his alibis on the murder night). He hews carefully to an unwritten code of sorts, which applies as much to Japan’s organized crime as to its warriors. Yakuza films were abundant in those days, so I presume Melville took his inspiration from those. The introductory text about the solitude of a samurai, by the way, was entirely made up by the director. I guess he wanted the samurai image however he could accomplish it.

The style is spare, the story straightforward, and the dialogue only as much as needed for the plot. The director prefers to show rather than tell, getting great mileage out of knowing looks and small gestures. The film never explains just why Delon doesn’t kill the singer as soon as he sees her since she can now identify him as the murderer, nor does it indicate why she protects this man she’s never seen before. It’s all implied in the slowly unfolding story without ever being spelled out, a style I greatly appreciate. Some parts shouldn’t work, like the singer’s strange cool when Delon is pointing a gun at her head, but somehow the director carries it off.

Delon is perfect as the hitman. He wears his face like a Noh mask, letting his silences speak louder than words. Nathalie Delon (the actor’s then-wife) is superb as the lover in her screen debut, and Caty Rosier is a standout as the pianist. But the cast was great from top to bottom. A wonderful film.