Le doulos was based on the 1957 novel by Pierre Lesou, who reportedly said that he preferred Melville’s film adaptation to his book. The story, in both novel and film, is a densely packed web of deceit in which desperate characters manipulate those around in them in a dual effort to preserve their own lives and discover who is loyal and who is not (loyalty is one of the film’s primary themes, and its maintenance and betrayal drive most of the characters’ actions). The story’s focus is divided between two main characters, both of whom remain opaque until the film’s final moments. We first meet Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani), who is introduced walking beneath shadowy bridges in a fatalistic lengthy tracking shot under the opening credits. Wearing the iconic gangster trench coat and fedora, he is clearly walking toward death, although in this case it is not his own, but rather his friend Gilbert (René Lefèvre), whom he kills in cold blood. Maurice then steals a bag of jewels Gilbert was assessing from a previous robbery and buries them beneath a lamppost, an action that will set off an inexorable chain of events.

We then cut to the other main character, Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo, already an international icon only two years after his star turn in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless), a friend of Maurice’s who is rumored to be a police informant (the title of the film means “the hat,” which is also French-gangster slang for a stool pigeon). Maurice tells Silien about a robbery he’s planning, and when said robbery is foiled by the police and results in the death of a cop, it seems that Silien’s informant status has been confirmed. But has it? Melville’s narrative trickery relies heavily on upending the obvious, which means that questions are never answered the first time around; every character is lying on some level, which underscores another of the film’s most important themes: the nature of deception and how it is necessary for survival, but also the constant source of death. Thus, Melville is playing with the cruelest irony of the underworld.

Even though it was his first true gangster film, after watching Le doulos you would think that Melville had been making them for years. He had clearly absorbed the gangster worldview from countless American films, which he cherished far above the inferior French gangster films that had glutted the market in the 1950s (in a television interview, Melville dismissed French gangster films, noting that the only “serious” one he could think of was the 1955 masterpiece Rififi, which was not incidentally directed by the American expatriate Jules Dassin). The film is infused with a perverse sense of violence, which is first suggested in the unexpected opening murder, but is solidified when Silien’s casual conversation with Gilbert’s girlfriend Therese (Monique Hennessy) turns suddenly and sharply cruel, reminding us that every interaction, no matter how seemingly benign, can turn dark. Working with veteran cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, Melville gives Le doulos a classic noir feel that, as others have pointed out, creates a sealed universe that is completely artificial, but also utterly compelling. Melville’s use of inky shadows, canted angles, and fluid camera movements imbues the film with its crucial fatalism, and as characters step in and out of the light, we are reminded of both their moral duality and the fact that nothing can be trusted until the final bullet has been fired.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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