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Afternoon
When You Read This Letter (Quand tu liras cette lettre…)
Dismissed by Melville in its time as “a very conventional, very sensible film” made in part to fund his film studio, When You Read This Letter is a slightly uncharacteristic but nevertheless fascinating swerve in the director’s early career into the realm of melodrama. On a tonal spectrum opposite the laconic moodiness of something like Le samouraï, Letter is a […]
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Le samouraï
Melville’s icy, pinpoint-precise masterwork about a taciturn contract killer dealing with the aftermath of a job gone awry offers the template for generations of similarly laconic thrillers such as Walter Hill’s The Driver, John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. But few of these descendants can match the dark void opened by Alain Delon’s steely anti-hero, […]
Find out moreClasse tous risques (The Big Risk)
Written by ex-con José Giovanni, Claude Sautet’s debut feature emanates an insider’s view of the postwar Parisian crime world, as well as a tenderness sometimes pointedly lacking in Melville’s hardened milieu. Grizzled former wrestler Lino Ventura plays Abel, an aging French gangster in exile in Milan after his last job left him persona non grata […]
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