Background
Jean-Pierre Melville was born on 20 October 1917 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Jean-Pierre Melville was born on 20 October 1917 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.
Melville was in the Resistance and in Britain during the war. Afterwards, he reverted to an amateur interest in moviemaking and, in 1947, he made his first feature from the story by Vercors about a German officer billeted in rural France who falls in love with a French girl. It was a more concentrated, sensitive, and interior film than the later movies would suggest. Sadly, it is little known today. If memories are accurate, it is a major film, important to the development of Bresson, Astruc, Resnais, and possibly Rohmer. In 1949, Melville played a small part in Cocteau’s Orphée and then directed an adaptation of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, this at the authors request. At a time when Cocteau the filmmaker was at his peak, the personality of Les Enfants Terribles is still Melville’s. Cocteau collaborated on the script and haunted the set, and the film is faithful to the novel; but its sense of complicity and betraval, of disorder and luminous death, are all part of Melville’s persistent vision.
But the dream world of Les Enfants was over a decade in crystallizing. Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre is a pedestrian melodrama. Bob le Flambeur, although a turning point, was a sort of lyrical documentary thriller. Deux Hommes à Manhattan, in which Melville plaved a leading role, was filmed in America and meant as a love letter to New York. In fact, its intentions are stronger than its effects. Léon Morin was nearly a return to the delicate unpicking of emotion in Silence de la Mer, and an odd reappearance of Melville’s interest in the spirit and the Occupation.
Le Doulos was the first of the new thrillers and the beginning of Melville’s development of a world filled with doors through which bullets may come at any moment. These films are virtually interchangeable; for the environment and legend are important above everything else. It was an independent path, very entertaining, but not as demanding of Melville himself as his first films, as evident in the late return to France during the war—L'Année des Ombres—which subtly turns the underworld into the Resistance.
Still, it was in this last period that Melville made a masterpiece of French noir—Le Samourai— with Alain Delon as a fatalistic icon moving toward certain closure. Done on the wide screen, with mysteries in every comer, the film is quick, deadly, and so tough that its impassive romanticism is not just fascinating, but nearly comic.
Referred to himself as a "right-wing anarchist".
Quotations: “I’m incapable of doing anything but rough drafts. Each time I see one of my films again, then and only then can I see what I should have done. But I only see things this clearly once the finished print is being shown on the screen everywhere and it’s too late to do anything about it."
As acknowledged by his appearance in Breathless (59, Jean-Luc Godard), Melville was an ancestor of the New Wave. Le Silence de la Mer was an heroic instance of the outsider making a film and renovating the medium as he did so. Bob le Flambeur was immensely influential in the way it re-created the ambiance of the American thriller and vet encouraged spontaneous, location shooting. No one who had named himself after the author of Moby Dick, who had Melville’s affection for American cinema of the 1930s, and yet who insisted on prickly French truths, could fail to appeal to the new generation. Good enough, but Melville exists in his own right.
Bob was a turning point for Melville himself, inaugurating a Hustonian dream of tough, self-sufficient men in trench coats, fickle girls, and a maelstrom of treachery and heroic gestures. The romance was made astringent by the casual humor, the remarkable eye for honor, friendship, and double-cross, and the pleasure at a world Melville made his own, even to the extent of having his own studio. There is a haphazard grace in his pictures that stems from the deliberate offhandedness with which they were made.
He had a built-in breathlessness, in fact, an adopted resignation to transience and mutability that is partly an eccentric individualism and partly what Melville inherited from American mobility and obsolescence. It gives his gangster films a true supercharge—“en quatrième vitesse"—and he transformed Belmondo and Delon into beautiful destructive angels of the dark street. But this gain was at some cost. For Melville’s later films were more youthful than his earlier ones.