MY DVD COLLECTION 7

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973)

French director, Jean-Pierre Melville always looks like he should appear in gangster films but instead he decided to direct them and he did that better than any of his contemporaries. He once said : "It so happens that the gangster story is a very suitable vehicle for the particular form of modern tragedy called film noir, which was born from American detective novels. It's a flexible genre. You can put whatever you want into it, good or bad. And it's a fairly easy vehicle to use to tell stories that matter to you about individual freedom, friendship, or rather human relationships, because they're not always friendly. Or betrayal, one of the driving forces in American crime novels."  I discovered Melville in the 60's when the film company I worked for distributed LE DEUXIEME SOUFFLE (or SECOND BREATH) in England. I watched the film in a basement screening room in Wardour Street  and I was immediately hooked. One of Melville's films LE SAMOURAI is among my ten favourite films of all-time. Melville himself was obsessed by American culture, drove a Cadillac, wore Stetsons and fedoras, drank Coca Cola and loved the American movies which inspired him. He said: "I'd usually see five films a day. Fewer than five and I'd get withdrawal symptoms. I've always had a screening room at home so I could watch a couple of American films after dinner." The films of Jean-Pierre Melville in my DVD collection are : LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1949) LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1950) BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) LEON MORIN, PRIEST (1961) LE DOULOS (1962) SECOND BREATH (1966) LE SAMOURAI (1967) ARMY OF SHADOWS(1969) LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970) UN FLIC (1972)