Melville's French New Wave tribute to American noir

Like so many French movies from the New Wave era, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) owed a huge debt to American noir - and it pays off the debt as well. The title is a bit of a joke, as the central figure, Jef Costello, portrayed really well by Alan Delon, is not a Japanese feudal warrior, but he does share the morality or nonmorality rather of the Samurai: He is a hired killer, who can off someone just for the payout, without a shiver of fear and without emotion. We see him in the opening sequence set up an alibi, steal a car, enter a nightclub, and without flinching he shoots the owner in his office. Then the trouble begins: by coincidence, he's one of the suspects rounded up by the Paris police; a beautiful woman jazz piano player at the club witnessed him fleeing after the shooting, but she refuses to ID him to the police. When Delon goes to collect his pay, he gets shot in the arm - the team that hired him thinks he's double-crossing them. From that point we go on an elaborate chase and escape, some seen from Delon's POV and some from the police, as the police close in on him; throughout, he remains incredibly cool, and a highlight is a cat-and-mouse game as he eludes about 50 police officers pursuing him through the Metro (part of the fun of this film is getting a look at Paris in the '60s - many fewer cars, a lot more urban poverty, and the Metro pretty much the same). To be honest, the complex conclusion of this drama swept right by me; I never quite get who exactly hired Delon or why and have no idea of the role of the supercool (and living in luxury) jazz pianist, whom Delon confronts in the final sequence (I won't give anything away), but this movie isn't really about plot, it's about atmosphere, which Melville creates beautifully: the dark streets and long alleys, the seedy apartment, the excellent use of tracking shots through long scenes of investigation and interrogation, the contrast between the flashy nightclub and the grim world on the streets, and most of all the presence of Delon throughout, always in moxie, with his trenchcoat (he chases from beige to blue after he's shot in the arm), white dress shirt, cocked fedora.