Le Samouraï (Studios Jenner, Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique, Fida Cinematografica, Filmel, T. C. Productions, S. N. Prodis, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later I watched Le Samouraï as the first episode in the long-awaited return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” telecast after a month and a half off to commemorate Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month series and also the network’s annual “31 Days of Oscar” celebration. It’s a film I’ve heard a great deal about over the years, though it was shot relatively late (1967) for a film noir and Melville and his associates – co-writer Georges Pellegrin and cinematographer Henri Decaë – made a bad mistake. They shot the damned thing in color, thereby missing the cool, dark chiaroscuro look of classic noir and not coming up with anything worthwhile to replace it. (For an example of how to do classic film noir in color, check out Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet, a 1956 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit in which Dwan and his cinematographer, John Alton, successfully re-created the noir look despite the handicap of color.) The plot deals with Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a professional hit man in the Parisian underworld, who’s assigned to kill Martey, the owner of a swanky jazz nightclub whose star entertainer is a Black woman pianist (Caty Rosier). In his intro Eddie Muller suggested Rosier’s character was based on Josephine Baker, but because she’s a piano player and not a singer I was thinking more Dorothy Donegan or Nellie Lutcher here. In the opening scene we see Jef, whom we’re later told is such an Americaphile he’s taken as his alias a first name that sounds American, alone in his ratty apartment with a caged bird as just about his only companion. Melville, Decaë and a fellow cinematographer (the credits list Decaë for shooting the exteriors and someone else, whose name I didn’t write down, for doing the studio work, but imdb.com lists Decaë alone) shoot the opening scene as close to black-and-white as they could get, and only the blue smoke Jef is blowing out of his mouth as he smokes a cigarette in bed gives away that this film is going to be in color (alas).

Le Samouraï was supposedly based on a novel by Jean McLeod called The Ronin – “ronin” means “a vagrant samurai without a master,” and they were considered lower in status than the samurai who had masters – but there’s no trace of the existence of this book online and the general consensus appears to be that Melville invented the plot himself and decided to attribute it to a nonexistent writer. The film opens with a supposed quote from Bushido, the traditional Japanese book on the ways of the samurai, but this one is definitely made up by Melville (and perhaps co-writer Pellegrin as well). Melville also reportedly said he based this film and Delon’s character in it on the hit man Alan Ladd played in Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (Paramount, 1932), which made Ladd a star after years of slaving away in “B” movies for independent producers. But there’s little of classic noir in this film, which is surprisingly boring despite a few intense action scenes. Most of it is simply Jef Costello making his way around Paris, mostly trying to avoid capture by a determined police squad headed by an unnamed “Commissioner” (François Périer, usually known as a comedian but pressed into service here for a deadly serious role) after he kills Martey but his carefully constructed alibi (involving an all-night poker game in a hotel as well as his girlfriend Jane Lagrange, played by Delon’s real-life wife at the time, Nathalie Delon, though they were already in the process of separating when this film was made and broke up officially in 1969) quickly falls apart when at least one of the club patrons identifies him. There are some quite clever touches in Le Samouraï, including the long key ring Jef carries with him; he drives only stolen Citroën cars (the Citroëns had a deliberately futuristic look that makes them among the coolest cars ever), and the key ring has a sample of every key combination used to start a Citroën. While one wonders whether this in itself could attract the attention of the police – especially if Jef had to work his way through most of the keys in his collection before he found the one that started the particular car he was stealing – the two times we actually see him do this he gets the right key on the fourth or fifth try.

Midway through the film Jef finds himself on the receiving end of an attempted hit from a blond man named Wiener (Michel Boisrond), who gave him the contract to kill Martey but worries that since the police held Jef in custody for hours, even though he told them nothing and the cops eventually let him go, Jef has become a liability he and his boss, Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier), need to get rid of. Jef and Wiener confront each other twice, the second time in Jef’s apartment just after Jef has noticed and disconnected a “bug” the police had planted in his home. This time Wiener offers Jeff another contract and Jef reluctantly agrees, only it turns out the new victim is the Black piano player at Martey’s. In the final scene, after Jef checks his gun to make sure it’s loaded (it’s a six-shot revolver and all the chambers are full), Jef confronts the pianist between sets at the club. She asks, “Why do you want to kill me?,” and he says, “Because someone hired me to.” Then the police, who have staked out the club, open fire on the scene and kill Jef, and it turns out his gun was empty but there’s no particular clue as to who emptied it, when or how. Prior to that there’s a long tracking sequence in which the police are keeping Jef under electronic surveillance as he makes his way through the Métro (the Paris subway), and his location is indicated by solid lights on a map of the city that are turned on remotely whenever a police operative sees him pass by a particular spot. This reminded me of the 1949 film White Heat, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney, which Charles Reich in his 1970 book The Greening of America cited as a dramatization of the clash of values between “Consciousness I” – the rugged individual of American historical myth – and “Consciousness II,” the bureaucratization of society and the systematization of everything into order, structure and routine. Like Cagney’s character in White Heat, Delon’s character here is ultimately brought down not by a similarly individualistic cop but by a whole bureaucracy, with each of its cogs meshing in predetermined ways to find the killer and either arrest or kill him.

Le Samouraï had a troubled production history; Studios Jenner, the production facility Melville had built himself with the proceeds from his previous films, burned down midway through the shoot. Melville suspected arson, but the real-life police investigation didn’t prove it one way or the other and the mystery was never solved. This forced Melville to go hat-in-hand to other film companies in Paris to rent studio space from them to finish the movie. Also, Le Samouraï wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972, five years after it came out in France, and the U.S. distributor had it dubbed into English and retitled The Godson to make it seem like an immediate sequel to the sensationally successful 1972 film The Godfather. It was only years later that another distributor issued Le Samouraï in the U.S. in a properly subtitled version that accurately reflected what the original French audiences had seen in 1967. The film since then has been hailed as a classic, but I still think it’s an uneven film with a lot of longueurs and an absence of the wall-to-wall background music it would have had if it had been an American film – though that might not be such a bad thing; certainly the final chase benefits, in a way, from not having a Mickey Mouse-style score telling us minute by minute just how we’re supposed to react to the events that happen!