The Gangster’s All Here

With a Parisian hit man less emotional than a clock for a hero, Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” is an austere poem of crime, a fatalistic exercise in myth-making and transcendent style.

Repeatedly sold out when it served as the centerpiece of last year’s American Cinematheque tribute to Melville, this rarely seen modern classic from France returns for a full one-week run in uncut 35-millimeter form at the Nuart in West Los Angeles starting Friday.

A pivotal modern director, Melville, who died in 1973 at age 55, is considered the spiritual father of the French New Wave. Among the working filmmakers who admire him is actionmeister John Woo, who has called 1967’s “Le Samourai” “the closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.”

On the surface, Woo’s explosive blood baths couldn’t be further from a crime film that is as precisely cut as a diamond. What the two men share, however, is a passion for the genre, a compulsion to romanticize and a feeling for antiheroes who live according to their own austere codes.

Best known for gangster films where fate decides everything and everyone is complicit in evil to one degree or another, Melville used actors ranging from Jean-Paul Belmondo to Lino Ventura for his trench-coated, Gitane-smoking heroes.

But Alain Delon, with his icily beautiful face and the dead eyes of a killer angel, was the actor who best suited Melville’s style, and “Le Samourai” was their key collaboration. As British critic Tom Milne wrote in a widely quoted essay, “The impossibility of love, of friendship, of communication, of self-respect, of life itself: All the themes from Melville’s work are gathered up in one tight ball in ‘Le Samourai.’ ”

The film opens with a stark, monochromatic image of Jef Costello (Delon) lying on the bed in his barely furnished room. A chirping bird is his only companion, and the smoke he blows into the air and the rain coming down outside are the only things that move.

Once Jef himself gets moving, it’s first to set up an elaborate alibi that involves his selfless girlfriend Jeanne Legrange (Nathalie Delon, the actor’s wife at the time). Then he pulls off a smooth hit on a nightclub owner after the most existential of verbal exchanges: “Who are you?” “It doesn’t matter.” “What do you want?” “To kill you.”

Well-planned as this crime is, the walls start to close in on Jef, starting with his coming face-to-face with a potential witness, the club’s beautiful pianist (Cathy Rosier). Then a crack police inspector (Francois Perier) has Jef trailed despite a lack of hard evidence, and the people who hired him show signs of breaking faith. How can Jef, the lone wolf who says without bragging or exaggeration, “I never lose, not ever,” retain control of his destiny? Just wait and see.

Never an effusive director, Melville pared his style down as far as it could go in “Le Samourai,” muting the colors to the point where he chose the female bullfinch as the bird that is Jef’s only friend because its plumage is simple black and white. And Delon, who says fewer words in the entire picture than some actors say in a single scene, is perfect as the bloodless criminal obsessed with giving his hat brim just the right turn.

Melville also concentrates here on his favorite themes, the links between criminals and those who enforce the law and the intricate mechanics of their parallel operations. The police’s attempts to trap Jef on the Metro, a system he knows as intimately as the Phantom knows the catacombs under the Paris Opera, is one of “Le Samourai’s” most bravura sequences.

Yet despite this attention to detail, Melville was the first to almost brag that “I am careful never to be realistic.” Stylization was his overriding concern, down to the white film editor’s gloves he has all his protagonists, Jef Costello included, put on before committing crimes.

Equally artificial is the quote from “The Book of Bushido” that starts the film: “There is no greater solitude than the samurai’s unless it be the tiger in the jungle.” It sounds too perfect to be real, and in fact Melville claimed he made it up. However, what is genuine about “Le Samourai,” the passion that Melville felt for this quintessentially American genre, is strong enough to make this one of the glories of the modern gangster film, elegant, romantic and unforgettable.

BE THERE

“Le Samourai” plays Friday through March 6. Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.