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LE DOULOS
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
| The popularity
of film noir following the Second World War certainly can be attributed
to French interest in American popular culture. The genre, after
all, is an American invention, the brilliant result of John Huston`s determination
to bring intact to the screen (1941) Dashiell Hammett`s seamy, cynical
novel The Maltese Falcon. This required Huston`s coming up
with new kind of American film—dark, worn, coolly corrupt, one that captured
the murky morality, danger, viciousness and essential rootlessness close
to the underbelly of American life. American though the genre is,
it claims antecedents. Cited most often is the shadowy expressionism
of silent German cinema. However, film noir more directly descends
from French poetic realism of the 1930s, which film noir is in fact a more
hardboiled, practically-minded version of. Thus in turning to noir,
French cinema was really returning to itself, in an effort to reestablish
French culture, which the war (and the Occupation) had interrupted.
While French film noir
retained
much of the harshness and
No wonder. In the ‘30s poetic realism, with its moody sense of suspended lives on the verge of doom, perfectly expressed a nation`s fatalism and despair as Germany swallowed more and more of Europe. France felt that nothing less than her soul was at risk, and the prospect was bleak. We may say, then, that in such great works as Marcel Carné`s Quai des brûmes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939) poetic realism looks hopelessly ahead. In a sense French noir extends this bleak vision; but it is also the case that it looks back, to the Occupation, even as it nearly always presents, as poetic realism did, contemporary narratives that catch a tenor of the times. French noir is a cinema of penetrating ambiguity, of confounded notions of liberty, loyalty and the law; in its domain, at whatever remove, an “underground” of rootless, subsistent and hunted criminals recalls, ironically, the Resistance, while at the same time the more posh criminals, the turncoats and the squealers, and of course the police authorities to whom they squeal, recall those who sold out France by accommodating the Germans. To fail to grasp this momentous depth in French noir is to miss the extent to which it expresses, bleedingly, the kind of national self-criticism France is, absurdly, often adjudged to be immune to. French noir flourished in the 1950s, when it was still deeply and painfully attached to its historical-cultural roots; but its greatest practitioner reached his artistic maturity in the 1960s. This was Jean-Pierre Grumbach, who, adopting the surname of the greatest American novelist, had become Jean-Pierre Melville. In his twenties during the Occupation, Melville, a Parisian, found the experience unshakable. His first film, The Silence of the Sea (1947), is directly about the Occupation, as is, fourteen years later, Leon Morin, Priest (1961). Both these remarkable films are non-noirs. Melville`s three great noirs are Le doulos (1962), Second Breath (1966) and his masterpiece, Le samourai (1967). It is with the first of these films, however, that this current essay deals. The title Le doulos translates as the finger man—in American parlance, the stoolie, or the rat. The film is an ambiguous descent into a morally clouded world of hoodlums, cops and, treading a line between the two, informants. In this world, people may not be what they seem, in either direction on the moral scale. Somebody`s loyalty may prove as unexpected as somebody else`s treachery. The story, I presume, derives from the novel by Pierre Lesou that the credits cite as the film`s source. Since his recent release from prison, Maurice has stayed with Gilbert, his accomplice in the Mozart jewel heist. The film begins outdoors, with Maurice ambling to Gilbert`s place. With its liberated air, this opening recalls that of François Truffaut`s The 400 Blows (1959), especially since, again, the sense of openness and freedom is ironic--this time, deadly ironic. For, while he walks, Maurice contemplates killing his benefactor. The reason? During Maurice`s incarceration Gilbert “silenced” Arlette, Maurice`s girlfriend, to insure against her defection to the police. Maurice knows better; Arlette would never have fingered Gilbert. And, although Gilbert has taken him in, isn`t his generosity grounded in guilt? But—but—. When the moment of decision arrives indoors, Maurice hesitates shooting Gilbert in the back with the man`s own gun. But he does shoot him dead. He had to, he explains later, because Gilbert had turned around and had seen the gun—“and you don`t point a gun at a friend.” At the outset, then, a moral tangle creates a knot of tortuous logic, hiding, perhaps, shame and fear of reprisal. The tangle tightens. Thérèse, Maurice`s current girlfriend, may be as treacherous as Arlette was loyal (if indeed she would have been had she lived). Is Thérèse also the sex partner of the policeman Salignari, and is she working for him undercover? Maurice now has one friend: Silien. But is this attentive friend perhaps being too attentive? And what is to be made of the fact that Salignari is Silien`s only other friend? Salignari is killed. Does Silien know, as we do, that it is Maurice, during a bungled heist, who killed Salignari? Is Silien loyal to Maurice?—or treacherous, and loyal to Salignari`s memory? Is he now protecting Maurice, as it appears, or is this rumored police informant the very one who fingered Maurice, causing his latest incarceration? Suspecting the worst, Maurice arranges from his cell for Silien`s execution. Released, however, he is convinced of Silien`s devotion. Silien reveals he dispatched Maurice`s betrayer, Thérèse. Now Maurice tries frantically to subvert the hit he arranged. Too late; all three men—Silien, Maurice, Silien`s assassin—pay with their lives. Le doulos is a deeply affecting work, full of embittered sorrow and a sense of regret. Typical of noir, its visual form, outstanding, often involves underlit interiors or some intrusion of light into utter darkness—the collision of small light and vast dark along the metaphysical line where life passes over: flashlights illuminating stretches of interior space; street lamps seemingly exhaling tenuous breath. Nothing is quite clear, in an atmosphere of suspiciousness, betrayal and ever possible betrayal: an evocation of the Occupation, to be sure, but also a description of its legacy: France, coping with her memory. Befitting a film descended from poetic realism—recall the ringing clock that outlasts François in Le jour se lève?—Le doulos shivers with symbolism. The principal one is Silien`s hat. For the longest time it seems inseparable from him, an extension of him that—I can`t resist the pun—encapsulates his toughness, privacy, secrecy, unknowableness, even indominability. Well into the film, at the gangster-owned night spot the Cotton Club (an American reference to match the earlier, funnier French one, the Mozart jewel heist), Silien doffs his chapeau for the first time that we see. (Ominously, the check number he is given is 13.) This transforms him. He appears exposed, boyish, vulnerable. Now we`re convinced of his innocence; somebody else must have fingered Maurice. The film`s last shot is of the empty hat. A true, brave, unselfish man, whom we thought a monster once, diminishes yet ennobles us in his passing—the tragedy of goodness in a fallen world. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien. (One year earlier he was superb for Melville as Léon Morin, a young priest involved in the Resistance.) His is a piercing performance, of such beauty and resilience as to justify both his own name and that of his character. |
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