The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Hinterland
How a former resistance fighter lit up French film
Jean-Pierre Melville was one of French cinema’s great talents. He was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in Paris in 1917: his parents were Jewish, from Alsace. After joining the army when war was declared, he was evacuated from Dunkirk, then returned to France to continue the fight, but to no avail. He became a résistant, with his brother and sister; the former was killed trying to get money to England for de Gaulle.
He took the nom de guerre “Melville”, after the author of a favourite novel, Moby-Dick. In
1942 he got out of France through Spain and joined the Free French army, fighting at Monte Cassino.
After the war, he decided to join a studio and become a film-maker: but no one was interested. With his customary determination, he set up his own production company and made films himself.
Melville is best known for work in two genres: films about the resistance, to which he brought formidable authenticity; and gangster films, of which the French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s made the best on earth.
He began in 1949 with Le silence de la mer, about a man and his niece in occupied France who have a refined German officer billeted upon them, but who resolve never to speak to him.
With its use of a narrator to compensate for the lack of dialogue it was a mould-breaking film; as it was in seeking to show an occupier as a rare civilised man.
Melville would go on to make other definitive films about the resistance: notably Léon Morin, prêtre (1961), about a young woman during the occupation who falls in love with her village priest, and L’armée des ombres (1969), which deals in a bleak way with the everyday hell of running a resistance operation.
His gangster films begin with Bob le flambeur (1956), which pioneered techniques, such as the jump cut, that would become familiar with the French New Wave, and tells the story of an attempt to rob the casino at Deauville. Le deuxième souffle (1966) stars Lino Ventura as a gangster who escapes from prison, and makes the mistake of getting involved in another robbery.
Alain Delon played the main gangster in Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), but excels himself in Melville’s last film Un flic (1972) as a cop on the trail of some bank robbers. The depiction of the robbery itself, set in a rain-lashed town on France’s Atlantic coast, is gripping, but the action of the film is remarkable even by Melville’s standards. The money has been stolen to fund a heroin deal, but the crooks decide to steal the drugs by boarding the non-stop night train on which a courier is transporting them: in case you haven’t seen it (and you should, like all Melville’s films) I shan’t describe the astonishing way in which this feat is pulled off. Delon gets his men in the end, but it is a grim business.
Melville died shortly after Un flic’s release, aged just 55. He never made anything approaching a bad film: had he lived a normal span one can only imagine what he might have achieved. As it is, he defines an entire, glorious epoch of French cinema.