Finding all three that I've seen to be superb,I started trying to decide which "new" title from auteur Jean-Pierre Melville I would watch for the ICM French viewing challenge. Whilst trying to decide, fellow IMDber Spikeopath mentioned about also having this movie waiting to be viewed, which gave me the push to put the doulos hat on.

View on the film:

Shuffling round quietly as his hands become covered in blood,Jean-Paul Belmondo gives a spectacular performance as Noir loner Silien. Holding to his heart a samurai loyalty to Maurice, Belmondo pulls Silien's clipped dialogue towards his sunken eyes, with Belmondo keeping his face hollow and eyes low as he crawls at the dirt of the underworld to get his friend freed. Locked away unaware of Silien's moves, Serge Reggiani gives a a great, brittle turn as Faugel, whose time spent behind bars and backstabbing has Reggiani feed into this Noir loner a mistrusting abrasiveness, which creates cracks when rubbed against Silien's sincere belief to get Faugel free.

Later calling this "My first real policier", writer/directing auteur Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of Pierre Lesou's novel brilliantly continues an expansion on Melville's recurring themes of an impossibility to remove doubts over mistrust and deceit from the bonds between friends and lovers. Sending Silien out on the streets as a lone Film Noir samurai,Melville brilliantly has Faugel's opening diamond heist reverberate to the bitter end, as a paranoia over who informed of the theft pulls Faugel, Silien and the rest of the underworld into an unwavering mindset of retribution for the sparkling diamonds.

Reuniting with Two Men in Manhattan (1959) cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, Melville picks up a doulos (a type of hat) and pulls out a mesmerising Film Noir atmosphere of ultra-stylised shadows running across every murky side street Melville tracks down, and in startlingly bare close-ups looks into the soulless gaze Silien commits each killing with. Clouding trust in deep black and white, Melville splinters the violence with expertly handled lone drips of blood running down the coats of loners across the screen and covering the doulos.

Another tale of dishonor among thieves and another masterpiece from Jean- Pierre Melville but this one's a little more complicated than most. "Le Doulos" is slang for a hat but in criminal circles it also means a police informer. The informer here is Jean-Paul Belmondo and he seems to be playing one side against the other, police and crooks, but to what end? The movie is tortuously plotted until it's all very neatly and beautifully tied up at the end and it pays homage, not just to the great Hollywood gangster movies, but to such classically poetic French films of the thirties such as "Le Jour se Leve" and "Les Quai Des Brumes". Belmondo is, of course, magnificent and SergeReggiani is suitably fatalistic as the gangster who sets everything in motion. An absolutely essential movie.

This film is a 1960s version of an American Film Noir flick. However, as it was made a little later and due to French sensibilities, there were some differences. First, the film was even more brutal, as one woman got beaten very convincingly and cruelly on film and another guy had a bloody bullet pulled from his shoulder. I didn't really mind these details too much, as the characters WERE bad people and you could easily see them behaving that way. Also, because this was created in the midst of the French New Wave, the camera work was a little fuzzier and cheaper than a polished Hollywood film. This isn't' necessarily worse--just different in style--sort of like some of Sam Fuller's films. The only real problems I had with the film is that the plot was a little confusing (probably less so if you are French) and there are many earlier, American Film Noir pictures that are simply better. This isn't to say this is a bad film--it's pretty good. It's just that I didn't feel it offered any sort of improvement over earlier works such as The Killers, DOA, Kiss of Death or any number of other Film Noir flicks.