The film is masterful in its control of acting and visual style. Against Delon’s detachment and cold objectivity, Melville sets the character of the police superintendant (Francois Perier), who barks commands over the police radio while masterminding the manhunt. He knows Jef is lying but can’t prove it, and there is a slimy scene where he tries to blackmail Jane into betraying Jef. Meanwhile, Jef tries to find the men who hired him, so he can get revenge.
One of the pleasures of Le Samourai is to realize how complicated the plot has grown, in its flat, deadpan way. With little dialogue and spare scenes of pure action (most of it unsensational), the movie devises a situation in which Jef is being sought all over Paris by both the police and the underworld, while he simultaneously puts his own plan into effect, and deals with both women.
The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense—how action releases tension, instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don’t care about are happening constantly.
Melville uses character, not action, to build suspense. Consider a scene where one of the underworld hirelings calls on Costello, to apologize and hire him for another job, and Jef stares at him with utterly blank, empty eyes.
“Nothing to say?” the goon says.
“Not with a gun on me.”
“Is that a principle?”
“A habit.”
Melville is in love with the processes of things in the movie. The sequence when Jef is tailed by cops on the underground has inspired several other films; police are stationed on every platform, but Costello hops in and out of cars, switches platforms and trains, and toys with them. There is also a lovingly directed sequence where two flatfoots plant a wire in Costello’s apartment. And a final scene where Costello returns to the nightclub where the murder took place, and is able to resolve all the plot strands and make his own statement—all while essentially remaining passive.
Thomson wrote that this film is “so tough that its impassive romanticism is not just fascinating, but nearly comic.” Some of the comic details are so quiet they could be missed. Consider the bird in Costello’s drab hotel room. It is a gray, shabby bird (of course) with an unpleasant chirp. Why would this man have a bird? Is it even his? Did it come with the room? The bird’s chirp provides an amusing payoff after the cops wire the room and set up a tape recorder that records only . . . chirps, for a while. Apart from the bird, the room contains the following personal possessions of Costello: His trench coat, his fedora, his pack of cigarettes, and a bottle of mineral water. At one point, he walks over to an armoire, and on top of it, I was delighted to see, were rows of water bottles and neatly arranged packs of cigarettes. You smile because such details are a very quiet wink from Melville, telling you he knows what he’s up to.
Jean-Pierre Melville (1917–73) was born Grumbach but renamed himself after the American novelist. He was a hero of the French resistance. After the war, by starting his own studio and making independent films on small budgets, he essentially pointed the way for the French New Wave. “I’m incapable of doing anything but rough drafts,” he once said, but in fact Le Samourai is as finished and polished as a film can be.
The elements of the film—the killer, the cops, the underworld, the women, the code—are as familiar as the movies themselves. Melville loved 1930s Hollywood crime movies and in his own work helped develop modern film noir. There is nothing absolutely original in Le Samourai except for the handling of the material. Melville pares down and leaves out. He disdains artificial action sequences and manufactured payoffs. He drains the color from his screen and the dialogue from his characters. At the end, there is a scene that cries out (in Hollywood terms, anyway) for a last dramatic enigmatic statement, but Melville gives us banalities and then silence. He has been able to keep constantly in mind his hero’s chief business.
The Long Goodbye
R, 112 m., 1973
Elliott Gould (Philip Marlowe), Nina Van Pallandt (Eileen Wade), Sterling Hayden (Roger Wade), Mark Rydell (Marty Augustine), and Jim Bouton (Terry Lennox). Directed by Robert Altman and produced by Jerry Bick. Screenplay by Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler.
Robert Altman’s Long Goodbye (1973) attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity, and narrative perversity. He is always the most youthful of directors, and here he gives us the youngest of Philip Marlowes, the private eye as a Hardy boy. Marlowe hides in the bushes, pokes his nose up against a window, complains like a spoiled child, and runs after a car driven by the sexy heroine, crying out “Mrs. Wade! Mrs. Wade!” As a counterweight, the movie contains two startling acts of violence; both blindside us, and neither is in the original Raymond Chandler novel.
Altman began with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the legendary writer of The Big Sleep (1946), the greatest of the many films inspired by Marlowe. On that one her cowriter was William Faulkner. There is a famous story that they asked Chandler who killed one of the characters (or was it suicide?). Chandler’s reply: “I don’t know.” There is a nod to that in The Long Goodbye when a character who was murdered in the book commits suicide in the movie.
Certainly the plot of The Long Goodbye is a labyrinth not easily negotiated. Chandler’s 1953 novel leads Marlowe into a web of deception so complex you could call it arbitrary. The book is not about a story but about the code of a private eye in a corrupt world. It is all about mood, personal style, and language. In her adaptation, Brackett dumps sequences from Chandler, adds some of her own (she sends Marlowe to Mexico twice), reassigns killings, and makes it almost impossible to track a suitcase filled with a mobster’s money.
I went through the film a shot at a time at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, sitting in the dark with several hundred others as we asked ourselves, “What do we know, how do we know it, and is it true?” Many of our questions center on the rich, sex-drenched Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt). Does she desire the death of her husband, Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer played by the gruff old bear Sterling Hayden? Or does she only want free of him? What about that seductive dinner she serves Marlowe (Elliott Gould) on the night Wade walks into the ocean? Does she intend to sleep with Marlowe? She does in the novel, and he is later part of her alibi when she kills Wade and makes it look like suicide. But here she doesn’t kill Wade. What is the link connecting Terry Lennox (the baseball star Jim Bouton), Eileen, and the gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell)? Does Augustine owe Wade money, as he claims to Marlowe, or does Wade owe Augustine money, as Wade implies in a Freudian slip? What is the exact connection between any money owed to anyone and the money in the suitcase? Only a final, blunt speech by Lennox, Marlowe’s unworthy friend, answers some of our questions.
Movie Marlowes
Raymond Chandler’s crime novels all feature private eye Philip Marlowe, the perfect character for big-screen noir thrillers. Noteworthy Marlowes:
Dick Powelclass="underline" Murder, My Sweet (1944), based on Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, with Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, and Otto Kruger; directed by Edward Dmytryk.