Le Doulos

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (1962) takes its title from underworld slang for a hat, and by extension an informant, and it is one of the director's purest distillations of the gangster code. Adapted from a Pierre Lesou novel, it took further the cool, ritualised crime cinema Melville had begun with Bob le flambeur and would perfect in Le Samouraï.

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, who may or may not be a police snitch, in a labyrinthine plot of betrayals that keeps the audience as off balance as the characters. Melville opens with a quotation, “One must choose: die… or lie”, and goes on to make deception the film's real subject, shooting in burnished monochrome a Paris of trench coats, rain and fedoras drawn equally from American noir and his own fastidious imagination.

Its elaborate structure of feints and reversals influenced crime cinema for decades, and Quentin Tarantino and John Woo are among its open admirers. The fascination with codes of honour among men who routinely betray one another is pure Melville. Stylish, cryptic and morally weightless in the most absorbing way, Le Doulos is essential for anyone drawn to the European crime film at its most refined. Belmondo's enigmatic anti-hero embodies the Melville code, and the web of betrayals and the burnished, rain-soaked style still enthral devotees of the crime film the world over; crime film-makers from Woo to Tarantino have studied its labyrinth of feints closely.