“There is no solitude greater than that of the samurai, except, perhaps, that of a tiger in the jungle…” Anyone who’s lived through the tough rub of Paris’ morning and evening rush, anyone who’s traversed the harrowing tunnels of monster stations Auber-Opéra and Montparnasse-Bienvenüe only to find themselves grinding flesh on flesh in a bulging métro or RER, may well honor the above epigraph (penned by the director himself) which opens Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 minimalist hit man classic, “Le Samouraï.” Indeed, the jungle metaphor has been used time and again to describe life in the Big City, and seems to haunt as much the two million plus commuters who scramble daily through the Ile-de-France’s complex network of subways and trains as it does the somber Melvillian universe of mute gangsters, dank banlieue side streets, and half-lit police stations reeking of stale wine and tobacco.
“Le Samouraï” is perhaps nothing less than a creeping still life of late 60’s Paris, its caper plot cut down to the purest thread of noir allegory: Jeff Costello (Alain Delon), an impeccably coiffed hired gunman, is tracked across town by a casually obsessive commissaire (François Pérrier) as he edges from one kill to the next, ultimately falling short of his final victim (Cathy Rosier), the very woman who just days before helped set him free. The film’s action—condensed into a vacuum pack of stark gestures and camera set-ups—passes in and out of Delon’s haunting 19th arrondissement studio, whose crumbling walls and wooden chairs give true meaning to the term glauque, while the killer’s various sorties reveal a Parisian underworld that’s all the more chilling when caught in the bare afternoon sunlight. Rain sheathed back alleyways, deserted industrial bridges, fake Deco subterranean jazz clubs, two-bit hotels doubling as gambling dens – all linked by a labyrinthine metro that the samurai exploits time and again to outflank the cops who, in the film’s final anti-chase sequence (nobody really runs, nobody really hides, and everyone pretends to be reading the paper), nearly nab Delon as he skirts ghost-like across the long travolator linking lines 1 and 7 at Châtelet-Les Halles.
Whereas the Paris of the late 50’s/early 60’s was an off-the-cuff backdrop filmed in grain-drenched black and white, the post-noir films of Jean-Pierre Melville, beginning with the less purist “Le Doulos” (1962) and “Le Deuxième Souffle” (1966) and reaching formal perfection in “Le Samouraï,” offer up a burgeoning metropolis where the ever-changing cityscape takes top billing. Melville’s revival of the classic crime genre into the modern urban setting would be echoed throughout the next decade by Hollywood’s own enfants terribles, whose neo-noir thrillers, shot live on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, owe more to Melville than we may be aware of: the outrageously daring subway sequences in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” (1971) seem, after all, directly torn from “Le Samouraï” and then turned up a few thousand notches.
