What a delight! I remember having seen Le Samouraï as a teenager 50 years ago, during the short few years of ideological and artistic de-icing of the Romanian communist regime between 1964 and 1968, when some of the world cinema crossed the Iron Curtain and hopes to re-connect Romania and Eastern Europe with the rest of the world were growing high. These hopes were cut short by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the melting of the Iron Curtain postponed by more than 20 years. Yet, in that period, a few fine movies were allowed to be seen in the East (some of them ‘shortened’ the scissors of censorship) and this lot included this fine gangster movie, a capitalist product with no moral message, not one that could be explained to the revolutionary masses in any case.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062229
Half a century later I had the feeling to live again some of the sensations at the first screening. I remembered the dark room, the smoke of the cigarette, the tweets of the bird, the raincoat and the hat. Alain Delon‘s look. Nathalie Delon‘s sex appeal. Cathy Rosier‘s mystery. The Citroen car and the garage where number plates were switched. The streets of Paris which for me at that time looked like a city from another planet, a place I will never be able to put the feet in.
(video source astraydogfilm)
Of course, I have learned a few things about cinema in this period of time. I can now trace the predecessors of Le Samouraï in the American gangster movies of the 30s and I know that the raincoat was inherited from Humphrey Bogart. I can also identify countless successors that were inspired by this film. Jean-Pierre Melville‘s work aged beautifully and this is due to the minimalist approach that reduces details to the exact amount necessary to create the suspense and describe the situations, to a story which is smart, complex and makes sense from all angles you analyze it, to the magnetic power of the principal actors and to the cool chemistry constructed between them. A film noir for eternity.