Le Samouraï

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï opened in 1967. It is the most internationally beloved of his films and one of the founding works of existentialist noir in French cinema, and its influence runs through Hong Kong action cinema (John Woo) and the American crime film (Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch).

Jef Costello (Alain Delon, in the role that defined his international image) is a contract killer of monastic precision who lives in a bare Paris apartment with a caged bullfinch and an alibi for every contingency. The film opens with the ritual of his preparations for a job: the alibi, the careful choice of weapon, the discreet entry through the basement of the target's nightclub. After the hit, the witness best placed to identify him, the nightclub's pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier), looks straight at him and says nothing. From there a police inspector (François Périer) tries to assemble enough evidence to arrest Jef, while Jef sets out to learn who hired him and why he is now being hunted.

Henri Decaë photographs a desaturated, grey-blue Paris of the late 1960s, a look Melville had refined in his earlier Bob le flambeur and would carry on into Le Cercle Rouge, and it became one of the founding visual styles of European crime cinema. Delon's performance, almost without dialogue, is the most-imitated portrait of professional restraint in the medium.