Le Doulos (1962) ***1/2 [Melville UHD Double Shot Pt. 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.

*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.

Jean-Pierre Melville Feature Films Ranked