Le Doulos (1962) ***1/2

Le Doulos (1962) ticks all the Jean-Pierre Melville boxes—charismatic lead*, crime, slow pace, short bursts of action/violence, detached/cool characters, double-crosses, style. It's a very good, noirish drama with a certain sense of reality due to its almost absence of score. I had seen the film once before but largely forgot the bulk of it. It's one of those movies where your attention span can drift in and out and the plot can seem confusing at times.

*Jean-Paul Belmondo, with his boyish good looks, has an undeniably intoxicating quality here, but his character is also a bastard. He betrays his associates and treats women like garbage, but—much like Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971)—he does it with a smirk on his mug throughout. Though the film can feel slow, there's an intricacy to the relationship of the characters that belies its simplistic surface nature. Le Doulos also has a satisfyingly dark ending that befits its neo-noir leanings.

You can find my Jean-Pierre Melville Feature Films Ranked list here.