Le deuxième souffle (1966)

Jean-Pierre Melville takes his favourite elements from the era of the film noir crime films, and treats them to some realism. 

The mood is always empty, and there is very little in the way of fun. 

There are some pretty, but pretty vacant dancing girls, who are only smiling because it is their job to smile, and their repeated turns and even their rehearsal, early in the picture, are as fun as it gets.

This is Le deuxième souffle (1966), a wonderful, omenous, wide ranging and all-enveloping French film noir and gangster flick.

Because it's French film noir, there is always going to be a slight difference. Some things are taken more seriously, like the back stories of the hoods, molls, cops and gangsters.

At the samw time, some scenes make less sense than we might like them to, but we are always midway through everything, and in real life, there is no scene setting. The sadness is somewhat hidden beneath the piped smooth vibraphone-based jazz that plays in the bars and clubs, and even in some of the featured houses.

This beautiful tense, funny, hard French film noir opens suddenly showing into the finale of an escape from prison. One man dies during the escape, but the other two make it out, and we follow them on an atmospheric run through the forest, in a minimal opening credits sequence with very little music.

From there Le deuxième souffle is one long and epic criminal ramble.

French Film Noir

A Bout de Souffle (1960)

A Bout de Souffle (1960) (Breathless) is a classic of something, but not everybody can agree what exactly it is a classic example of.

It is New Wave for sure, and although is too postmodern by far to be a genuine film noir, the French (and in this case Jean-Luc Godard, a Suisse) appropriated film noir for their own, and made a virtue of its every trope.

And film noir's every trope is stated in A Bout de Souffle. Trouble is that to appreciate Breathless, and see what is going on, a viewer has to see the picture from a historical context, which requires studying the French New Wave, film theory as a whole, and the lives and attitudes of its contemporaries.

Bob le flambeur (1956)

Bob le flambeur (1956)

For the lover of film noir, and the French dedicatee of American cinema, there is Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 movie Bob le flambeur.

Mai oui, Bob le flambeur is a French film, but in many ways it could barely be more American.

It was made by director Jean-Pierre Melville who was obsesed with all things American, and who loved the gangster films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s so much, that he made many of his own.

In Bob Le Flambeur, we find is the first great hommage to noir, for Bob Le Flambeur is an outsider's view of American cinema, an attempt to make an American style film on foreign soil.  

The story features many film noir elements — it is set in the criminal underworld of a big city, and features a loner who at various times works on both sides of the law, even though he is essentially a crook. The urban settings and the odd camera angles will also be familiar to viewers of classic film noir, as will be one of the main themes — a man undone because of a woman.