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( LE CERCLE ROUGE (PG) 136mm 0....
Jean-Pierre Melville used to drive around Paris in a Stetson. Born in 1917, he became an obsessive moviegoer in the 19305. He acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of American cinema, particularly the films of Howard Hawks and John Huston. Having served with the Resistance and the Free French in WW2, he changed his name from Grumbach to Melville as a homage, in part, to the author of Moby Dick. Then he was off making movies on shoestring budgets that were to inspire the French New Wave. He set up his own production company, worked with the great Jean Cocteau and, by the time he died in 1973, had made 13 films, six of which were gangster movies of rare existential genius.
Le Cercle Rouge was Melville‘s penultimate movie, first released over here in 1970 in a truly appalling cut. The British distributors refused to believe that there was a home audience for Melville’s original 150-minute edit of the film (despite it being a huge hit in its home land) so they hacked and dubbed the film to an inappropriate 102 minutes. It languished briefly in a few art houses and died, which is something of a tragedy because Melville’s laconic,
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Squaring the Red Circle
fatalistic thriller in its complete form is a masterpiece.
Melville transposes Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle into the complex disingenuous world of Gallic long macs, con men and hard-faced police chiefs. The film’s opening quotation, ascribed to the Rama Krishna, indicates that it is destiny that propels these thieves‘ existences - ‘on the appointed day they will inescapany be reunited in the Red Circle‘. And then we are plunged into the story of a recently released prisoner, Corey, and his nemesis: the methodical cat-loving inspector Mattel (Bourvil).
Melville regular, Alain Delon, as the cold eyed, moustachioed Corey is at the centre of this pared down hubris with some very fine support from Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand. It’s a stunning, referential, occasionally opaque film that resolves its own plot leaps by soaking everything with a kind of Far Eastern sense of process, honour and belief. Henri Decae’s cinematography is sick-stained and washed through beyond the realms of belief. The silent jewel heist central sequence (a flat face wink towards Dassin's Du Riffifi chez les hommes) in the Place Vendéme is worth the ticket price alone. Only the foolish and the mediocre should miss this one. (Paul Dale)
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