Le Doulos.

"There certainly were French crime films before Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, and plenty more got made later, but you can make a pretty good argument that the genre never got any better," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Without Le Doulos and Melville's 1967 Le Samouraï, you don't quite get Reservoir Dogs or Oldboy or John Woo's classic Hong Kong films."

"Le Doulos is a movie in which just about everything and everybody proves false," writes J Hoberman, previewing the highlights of the week in NYC for the Voice. "According to Melville, 'It was only when Le Doulos was finished and [Jean-Paul] Belmondo saw himself on the screen that he realized, with great astonishment, "Christ! The stoolie is me!"'"

It's "a classic, black-and-white noir, highlighted by an eight-minute interrogation sequence shot in a single panning take in a glassed-in room - but something of a disappointment, if you compare it with the elegantly abstracted films that followed, like Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge," writes Robert Cashill. Even so: "Haberdashery meant the world to Melville, and if there is a better-attired character than Jean-Paul Belmondo's possible doulos ('stoolpigeon') in a picture of this type than it was probably in another Melville film.

Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2007 11:28 AM