The world of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos (l963) is that of
gangsters and cops. Following the opening credits it’s explained that Le Doulos
means hat, which happens to be the hallmark of the lead character played by
Jean-Paul Belmondo. But the hat, it’s explained, is also street argot for snitch and it’s an important component of
the amoral morality of Melville’s universe. The movie, which is currently being revived at Film Forum, has a convoluted plot which is at times impossible to
parse. A recently released ex-con murders a seemingly beneficent fence who has taken him
under his wing. You learn that the murder is an act of vengeance, but more
questions are created than are answered as Belmondo’s character navigates his way on both sides of the law. New wave French cinema was obsessed with American
gangster movies; Breathless was, of course, the most well-known example of this
and rather than Citroens most of the characters in Le Doulos drive American
cars like their Hollywood counterparts. But the director’s vision is not the Manichean universe of right and
wrong. Le Doulos poses a kind of forensic version of a Kuhnian "paradigm
shift" in which the underworld of murderers and thieves mirror and reflect that duplicity of normative society. The lack of empathy is
at first shocking. The amount of killing is more reminiscent of a bloody Jacobean drama
than film noir. A woman is savagely beaten and then disposed of in a car that’s
pushed over a cliff. Belmondo, who orchestrates it to look like two gangsters
have shot each other by placing murder weapons in their hands, eventually
receives his own comeuppance. There’s both honor and dishonor among thieves who
are neither better nor worse than anyone else, seems to be the operant point.
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