The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 13-19
Le Doulos (1962)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
After the left turn of the religion-focused Leon Morin, Priest, Melville returned to the crime genre a year later with Le Doulos, working with Jean-Paul Belmondo again in a much different role, one that found him suppressing his natural charisma to inhabit one of the auteur’s signature poker-faced protagonists. Only once do we see Belmondo turn on the ladies’-man charm—in a scene between his character, Silien, and Thérèse (Monique Hennessy), the girlfriend of recently-released-from-prison thief Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani)—and even then, it’s merely a ruse to eventually get information from her. So it goes with most of the main characters in Le Doulos, though, all of them putting up fronts, to the point where the confusion that develops over who’s being loyal or disloyal to whom becomes precisely the point. It’s yet another instance of Melville finding existential import in the most worn-out of crime-movie clichés, with Le Doulos having a bit more of a procedural feel to it than the more mystical Le Samouraï and the more stoic heist machinations of Le Cercle Rouge. If nothing else, Le Doulos features the most direct encapsulation of the Melville ethos when Jean (Aimé De March) describes Silien as someone who “doesn’t let his feelings show.” In Melville’s world, such open emotionality is often the surest way to certain doom. Kenji Fujishima (July 15, 2:50pm, 7pm; July 16, 12:30pm, 8:50pm; July 21, 5:10pm; July 25, 4:55pm at Film Forum’s “Le Durs: Three French Tough Guys”)
