User Reviews

Gangsters and informants double crossing each other at every turn for past injustices. Not sure why the women were the worst informants no particular reasons given.

In fact there are so many double crosses that a couple at the end confused me... Jean for instance.

The movie was great until suddenly Silien (Belmondo) turns into a "good" gangster...then it loses steam and credibility which all comes down to over twisting the plot without credibility.

The last twist was totally unneeded and ruins the ending...the "good" bad guys kill each other...it also makes it seem squirrelly some how.

To dramatize gangsters because of some fictitious "code"...to romanticize them by dressing them in trench coats with the collars pulled up and Borsalinos on their heads...is not just naive, it's downright silly. One wonders what Melville, with Cagney and Raft in his system, would have done with some modern thugs like Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, Peter "Rabbit" Calabrese or Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik. These hefty slobs would look ludicrous in fedoras, and their "code" included back shooting each other.

Melville's fascination with idealized and rigidly unreachable gangsters comes across almost as weird as Hitchcock's fascination with blond ice queens who can be humiliated. We're talking fetish, and if Melville and Hitchcock weren't such masterful movie makers they'd probably be discussed in psychology textbooks and not in articles by film historians. But Melville and Hitchcock are masterful directors, and even their failures are interesting. Melville's Le Doulos is by no means a failure. It's a story of betrayal and double crosses and then more double crosses, some real, and some by tough men who make wrong assumptions. There's a sizable body count among those who wear trench coats and Borsalinos. The movie has that gritty, depressing, shadowed look of great noirs. If you're into masterful craftsmanship, Le Doulos is hard to beat.

Le Doulos tells us about Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani), a tired gangster just out of prison who knows someone informed on him. He kills the man, but did he get the right man? He plans a burglary, using his girl to check the place out and a friend, Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), to loan him the safe-cracking equipment. Bad luck again; the cops show up, one gets killed and Faugel gets a bullet in his shoulder. This time we think we know who the stoolie is. We'd be foolish to place a bet on it. Or would we? Now the story becomes as much about Silien as Faugel. Belmondo's Silien may be an oily charmer, but Belmondo gives him dangerous shock value as well as star charisma. His questioning of Therese, Faugel's girl friend, is startling

I don't buy the theory that a storyline that appears confusing is probably a great director's way of either playing with the audience or having an approach that is just too subtle for most of us to grasp. My theory is that, more often than not, the director simply lost control of the material, or ran out of production and editing time, or possibly just got a little bored with the project. I have no idea which was the reason with Le Doulos, but the storyline, already intricate with double crosses, leaves a lot for last minute tidying up. Silien's recapitulation of events, shown in flashback, doesn't help much. I started to think I must be in an English drawing room listening to Hercule Poirot explain how it all happened. Except...did I miss something at the end? No, but you sure better have an excellent memory for characters seen once, almost instantly. When you see finally what the last twist is, it seemed to me to be a case of heavy-handed theatrical irony.

The movie is a great technical experience to watch. It's a fine example of Melville's technical mastery of his craft and his fascination with film gangsters and the self-imagined world he places them in. The story? For me, not all that involving; it's the storytelling that's the pay off.

Melville's reputation, in my view, rests firmly on Army of Shadows, Bob le Flambeur and, to a lesser extent, Le Cercle Rouge. The more he veered into gangster style at the expense of the story, the more he veered into the world of film dilettantes and of professors of film studies. You know, the kind who love long tracking shots. Melville deserves better than what some of his professional enthusiasts lavish on him.

Along a long walkway, emerging from the dark, the shadowy silhouette of Serge Reggiani as Maurice Fogel, a taciturn and solitary figure walking beneath a bridge in a long track shot paralleled with the opening credits. His footsteps resonate as the passing of time's ticking. At one point, the camera 'loses' him to follow the long shots of horizontal linearity tracing a destiny foreshadowed by the opening existentialist sentence : 'One must choose … to die or to lie'.

Maurice enters an isolated sinister house and sees himself in the mirror. He meets Gilbert in a dark little room upstairs and their discussion economically delivers precious information on Maurice's background. He's an ex-con, who lost his touch and a girlfriend named Arlette and is preparing a robbery. Gilbert is obviously an old friend, warning Maurice about one of his acquaintances : a man named Silien, he offers him food, advice, and even a gun … what follows introduces us the duplicitous relationships prevailing in the underworld.

There starts a mind-blowing masterpiece of deliberate confusion, as the fundamental element on which survival is based. This ability to lie is vital for le Doulos, literally, the man with the hat ('le Doul' in French slang), the cop informer, Silien, portrayed with the perfect mix of detached elegance and methodical professionalism, by a young Jean-Paul Belmondo. "In this business, you either die like a bum or full of lead" Silien highlights the ephemeral and futile nature of his profession, whose only exit is to get rich and leave. Silien's plans feature a big house in Province, a beautiful woman, and a nice retirement for his friend, Maurice.

Friendship and loyalty are recurring themes in Melville's filmography, even in a world of thugs and murderers. Without principles, there would be basically no character to root for, and ultimately no tragedy. Both Silien and Maurice are crooked, but not morally corrupted. Maurice killed his friend Gilbert because he 'silenced' Arlette, and he could never have killed him if he hadn't turned his back. Melville was ahead of his time in his way to juxtapose ethical behavior with criminal acts. And if Silien's actions and involvement with the police inspire our suspicion, a long flash-back sequence debriefs us about Silien's true motives : Melville 'got us'.

"Le Doulos" contains all the classic Melvillian codes. The perfectionism of Silien and Maurice echo the iconic Samurai of Delon. The movie is so attention-demanding, several scenes need to be seen again like Maurice cleaning all the spots he touched before leaving Gilbert's house. The cops have this intelligence and refinement that create sumptuous interactions with the criminals. There's an extraordinary sequence where Silien discusses with Clain, the Police Chief, with a 360° panoramic view and no edit during exactly 8 minutes. The stunning black-and-white cinematography embodies the grim atmosphere. The first scene itself is an expressionist masterpiece in the way light reveals Maurice's duplicity with only half of his face visible, an ambiguity illustrated by the swinging lamp's dizzying effect.

Melville's genius is in the way he manipulates us, our regards toward the characters' motives are altered all through the film, and no conclusion is to be taken for granted, a reminiscence of the Occupation years when anyone could be a resistant or a collaborator, a friend or a traitor. The script and the editing maintain a suspenseful uncertainty as we never see Silien and Maurice interact. And even our perceptions change, we all see Silien as a vicious individual in the beginning, but when he takes off his hat, he's a vulnerable kid, an innocence confirmed by his smiling expression when we walks in the last scene, mirroring the first one with a sad premonition, subtly hinted by an allusion to "The Asphalt Jungle"'s ending, the theme of failure was also particularly cherished by John Huston.

John Huston, William Wyler, Robert Wise … Melville, who took his name from the novelist Herman Melville, was a vivid admirer of the great American gangster films. "Le Doulos" is to Melville, what "Kill Bill" is for Tarantino, a tribute to a worshiped genre. It features fedora hats, trench coats, cocktail bars, glasses of scotch, unfaithful dames, guns, lies, betrayal, honor and redemption, an anachronistic universe when we consider the Paris of the 60's. There is something totally Americanized and 40's in Melville's Paris. I was even surprised by the cars, so unusually big for the Parisian setting. Ultimately, the only indications of the sixties are the hairdo and clothes of Maurice's girlfriend Therese.

Which brings up a controversial issue : Melville's universe is a male one where women hardly play a significant part. I was shocked by the treatment of the beautiful Therese, before her informer nature is revealed. She's slapped, knocked out by Silien, tied up. He empties a bottle of whiskey on her face, humiliating her by messing up her face while he stays elegant. This brutal treatment followed by her fatal disproportional punishment, illustrates the gangster's cold-blooded nature, and the outsider status of women. Melville used women as foils for the virility of his characters, he didn't even cast female stars, as their acting seem awkwardly inferior to the men. Thérèse was played by an amateur, Melville's secretary, and she was a good an actress as the informer was a liar. Get the point?

But despite all the precautions taken by Silien, he couldn't prevent Maurice from hiring someone to kill him, while he was still considered a rat. Silien's house gave the unfortunate clue that he wasn't going to end like a bum. The thrilling climax responds to the codes of Greek tragedy with the two men who can't escape from their nature. Silien looks at himself in the mirror with the figure of a man entrapped in his condition, and the only way to get out of it, and conquers back a poignant humanity, is to let the hat fall

Finding all three that I've seen to be superb,I started trying to decide which "new" title from auteur Jean-Pierre Melville I would watch for the ICM French viewing challenge. Whilst trying to decide, fellow IMDber Spikeopath mentioned about also having this movie waiting to be viewed, which gave me the push to put the doulos hat on.

View on the film:

Shuffling round quietly as his hands become covered in blood,Jean-Paul Belmondo gives a spectacular performance as Noir loner Silien. Holding to his heart a samurai loyalty to Maurice, Belmondo pulls Silien's clipped dialogue towards his sunken eyes, with Belmondo keeping his face hollow and eyes low as he crawls at the dirt of the underworld to get his friend freed. Locked away unaware of Silien's moves, Serge Reggiani gives a a great, brittle turn as Faugel, whose time spent behind bars and backstabbing has Reggiani feed into this Noir loner a mistrusting abrasiveness, which creates cracks when rubbed against Silien's sincere belief to get Faugel free.

Later calling this "My first real policier", writer/directing auteur Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of Pierre Lesou's novel brilliantly continues an expansion on Melville's recurring themes of an impossibility to remove doubts over mistrust and deceit from the bonds between friends and lovers. Sending Silien out on the streets as a lone Film Noir samurai,Melville brilliantly has Faugel's opening diamond heist reverberate to the bitter end, as a paranoia over who informed of the theft pulls Faugel, Silien and the rest of the underworld into an unwavering mindset of retribution for the sparkling diamonds.

Reuniting with Two Men in Manhattan (1959) cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, Melville picks up a doulos (a type of hat) and pulls out a mesmerising Film Noir atmosphere of ultra-stylised shadows running across every murky side street Melville tracks down, and in startlingly bare close-ups looks into the soulless gaze Silien commits each killing with. Clouding trust in deep black and white, Melville splinters the violence with expertly handled lone drips of blood running down the coats of loners across the screen and covering the doulos.

Near the end of Le Doulos Belmondo sits in a bar and explains the entire plot of the film to Reggiano. This takes ten minutes or more and involves numerous brief flashbacks which force Reggiano and the viewer to reassess all Belmondo's perverse and vicious acts of the last hour or so of screen time as an expression of profound friendship. This is a very dull scene. It's also a useful scene because it reveals the true nature of this film, not a French film noir besotted with the American 40s films, but a Miss Marple mystery in noir clothing.

Melville has captured all the surface qualities of film noir. Check out the marvellous opening sequence of Reggiano walking to the beat of the title music (rather like Travolta in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever) along some railway lines to arrive at the kind of weird little house peculiar to french films. But, Melville's film doesn't seem to get hold of the deeper sensibility of the 40s classics in the way that Chinatown and Bladerunner do (for example). The central character is not experiencing a crisis of morality and/or identity in an incomprehensible and amoral world, rather he is a scumbag in a scummy world. It makes for unengaging watching.

Maybe this is a world Melville wanted to depict, but in the end Le Doulos is a tiresome whodunnit. It's gritty, or more accurately misogynist and nasty, and often great to look at, but this is not a lesser known should be classic.

I am ashamed. I intend to comment a sequence about a film I consider one of the best french crime flick ever, and directed by the greatest french film makers ever, and I don't remember which actors are in the sequence I want to talk about. I only remember Reggiani in this scene.

It takes place in an attic, at least in an old mansion, where two friends talk to each other in front of a loot: jewelery pieces. One of the two is sitting on a bed, playing with his piece, whilst his pal is standing with the other fellow behind his back. Follow me?

The guy sitting - I am nearly sure Reggiani - goes on playing with the gun and suddenly his friend turns back to face his friend talking to him. A friend who has the gun barrel just point on the standing man's chest. WITH NO INTENT TO KILL HIM. The two friends stop talking and fix one's eyes to each other. No comment. An absolutely terrific moment. Guess what will the sitting man do, whilst seeing his long time pal watching him with the gun pointed in his direction, with the loot besides... The sitting man finally SHOOTS his pal. ONLY ONLY ONLY because he would have NEVER beared to continue living besides his friend with this terrible doubt between the two of them. At least from his pal, who would have never looked his friend in the same way anymore. Unbearable here too.

The absolute perfection to describe the complex manhood friendship that we only could find in Jean-Pierre Melville's films, and Pierre Lesou's novels. Speaking of Lesous' books, in this story, there is an element already present in L'ARDOISE - another film adapted from Lesou. A story where you also find an error of judgment; a man kills another friend of his, whom he suspects to have killed his wife several months or years ago. And, besides, also the scheme of a character who kills another one, because he - again - thinks he deserves it for treason. And he is wrong. Nearly a trade mark in Lesou's stories.

The plots of some of Raymond Chandler's stories were not even understood by their author. From the reviews on this site it is clear I am not alone in having problems with the plot of this film. The beginning was fairly clear, although it was difficult to know why the gloomy released prisoner, Maurice Faugel, suddenly shot the kind and friendly old fence, Gilbert. The ending was fairly clear: it was obvious that mistakes were being made by the trigger-happy threesome, Faugel, Silien and a jailbird called Kern. I understood hardly anything of the stuff in between. It kept me guessing. If I watch the film some few times again, with the help of Wikipedia's elucidation, perhaps I will be able to figure it out.

Faugel reminded me slightly of Mr Bean. Belmondo, the only familiar face, who plays the multiple treble-crosser, Silien, seemed very different from the character in "Breathless", although that film was made only two years earlier. He looked slimmer, more restrained and subdued, and younger, although he had seemed quite young in "Breathless".

It's all very intriguing and bewildering. The girls are extremely badly treated, beaten up and even murdered by the men. It is baffling and difficult to know why, but this kind of relationship between the sexes is quite typical of noir films. Somebody once told me it's because relationships during the war, WWII, had been characterized by unease, treachery and faithlessness.

On its release the film was given a mindlessly critical review in the New York Times. I was entertained.