Le Samouraï

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï opened in 1967 and is widely considered Melville's most internationally beloved work and one of the foundational pieces of the noir-existentialist tradition in French cinema. The film has been continuously cited as a primary influence on the Hong Kong action-cinema tradition (John Woo) and the broader American crime-cinema canon (Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch).

Jef Costello (Alain Delon, in the role that defined his international image), a contract killer of monastic precision, lives in a bare Paris apartment with a caged bullfinch and an alibi for every contingency. The film opens with Jef preparing for a job in his characteristic ritual: the sustained alibi, the careful weapon, the discreet entry through the basement of his target nightclub. After the hit, the witness who could most precisely identify him — the nightclub's pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier) — looks at him directly and says nothing. The remainder of the film follows the police inspector (François Périer) attempting to assemble enough evidence to arrest Jef, while Jef begins to investigate the contractor who hired him and now wants him eliminated.

Henri Decaë's photography of the desaturated grey-blue Paris of the late 1960s — a register Melville had refined across his earlier Bob le flambeur and would extend through Le Cercle Rouge — produced one of the foundational visual styles of European crime cinema. Delon's central performance, almost without dialogue, is widely cited as the most-imitated portrait of professional restraint in the medium.