Le Doulos

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

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

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