Alain Delon as ‘Jef Costello’, “Le Samouraï” (1967)
No, he sure isn’t.
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I love Melville’s movies. He was a movie gateway drug for me, turning me on to all sorts of great French gangster/noir/crime films, and the actors in them that I would otherwise never have been exposed to.
Dan – I love that Melville was the gateway for you. I also love that his stuff is so clearly derivative of 1930s gangster movies and American noir, etc., but that it has a feel all his own. You can feel the influence, but it becomes its own thing.
I’m obsessing on Delon, currently – and recently re-watched the Criterion Le Samourai. he is just riveting. I love that character, odd as he is. Not normal, not normal at all!
Delon and Melville were a potent team – this film, LE CIRCLE ROUGE and UN FLIC. All terrific.
I’m watching Le Cercle Rouge tonight – that is one I have not seen. My brother gave it to me for Christmas. I am afraid of the spider scene (don’t laugh: it’s a serious phobia!!) – but my brother told me when to expect it so I can close my eyes. I realize I sound neurotic but honestly I am too tired to cover it up at this point.
I am excited to see it. I’ve seen Silence of the Sea and a couple others.
Eh, just focus on Yves Montand’s crazy reactions.
You don’t sound any more or less neurotic than most of us, anyway.
I love BOB LE FLAMBEUR and LE DOULOS, too, and of course ARMY OF SHADOWS is just staggeringly great. I’m due to re-watch LE DEUXIEME SOUFFLE soon.
I will close my eyes through the entire sequence. I seriously can’t handle it. But I am psyched to see the film. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a while now.
Awesomely enough, my brother totally understands my phobia and gave the film to me saying immediately, “There is a terrible spider scene but here is the context of the scene – and here is what leads up to it so you can close your eyes.” Good brother. If I had popped in the film and been snuck up on by that scene, I would have had a meltdown.
I always skip the opening sequence of Persona, for example.
I can stare directly into the eyes of a cobra, but I don’t do spiders.
This comments thread is getting complicated – I hope this comment shows up in the right place.
Dan: I love John Woo’s stuff as well, and I know Melville was a big influence. It’s like: you take these genres – well-known well-trod ground – and you use them as a contemplation on all different kinds of things. They are blank slates, almost – genres like gangster films or thrillers. The form is set in stone, so that actually gives you a lot of freedom as a director and storyteller.
Whoa this thread grew and grew!
I think it’s the ‘derivative’ bit the I groove on – the Melville (and other French filmmakers working in genre) take American tropes and ideas and spin them back – so cool! It’s one of things that drew me into HK movies as well, starting with John Woo, my other big cinematic gateway drug.
Le Cercle Rouge is great, I think you’ll really enjoy it. Army of Shadows is perhaps my favorite Melville though.
I hope you write more about Delon, as with your other obsessions. I’ve only seen a few of his movies but he’s such a force – the ‘Ice Cold Angel’ indeed! One of his films, a heist flick with Charles Bronson (an actor I think is under appreciated), is coming up in my Netflix queue. I watched the two of them in a western, with Mifune too (!), and it was awesome fun.
I have an ongoing fascination with actors (it is mostly actors, although some actresses have it too) who can capture a certain kind of psychotic “blankness”. Delon is top of the heap. I’ll write more about that – but his ability to suggest such an abstract level of detachment is quite unique.
Not sure where this will show up. but I’m responding to your post from 2/28 @ 8:06 AM….
It’s the contrast – forms set in stone containing total freedom within to create – that attracts me. On one level I know this limits me – much of modern art, that breaks these forms, leaves me cold, even when I’m informed enough to appreciate what the artist was doing or treying to do. I’m beginning to understand this love of form is a kind of coping mechanism, that nurtures as well as limits me.
Didn’t Woo contribute a commentary or an essay to a Criterion edition of one of Melville’s films? In A Better Tomorrow Chow Yun Fat’s character wore Alain Delon brand sunglasses. I think Delon wrote him a letter of thanks for the sales this generated in Hong Kong.
// forms set in stone containing total freedom within to create // I totally love that too. It’s one of the best things about genre anything!!
And OMG about Delon’s sunglasses: I did not know that. That is so cool.
Sheila, which other Melville films have you seen? He’s a favorite of mine, as is LE SAMOURAI. I recently watched it again, too.
I love that damn chirping bird. I would kill that thing in 24 hours just to shut it up. Great detail.
Also, I find Melville’s crime movies less derivative of American crime movies and more of American pulp fiction – of David Goodis, Ross (and John D.) Macdonald, Chandler, Thompson, et al.
Okay, of course it’s also derivative of American crime movies. I just always think of that direct line from hard-boiled American writers to Melville (and Melville’s younger colleagues).
Whatever it is, it’s derivative.
This is a guy who changed his name in tribute to Herman Melville during the resistance and later rode around Paris in big American cars wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses. I think its safe to say he was into American pop culture.
hahahaha, God love ‘im.
For me, though, this film is all about the performances. Mainly Delon, but the others as well. It’s Delon’s movie.
But I’m an actor-nerd. I understand a director’s contribution, but movie-making is the Actor’s Game, as far as I’m concerned.
That said – I’d be curious to see what you make of his first film, LE SILENCE DE LA MER. Very different sort of film, wonderful performances.
Jef Costello is one of the most fascinating guys I’ve ever seen on screen. That’s what I mean when I say that whatever may have been influencing the style – the end result is its own thing. In his own way, Jef Costello is as chillingly memorable as Travis Bickle.
the moment of tenderness he has at the end with the girlfriend, the sudden touching of her face – it is the only time he has seemed even remotely human (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions: feeding the bird, cleaning his wound) – and it’s just breathtaking. It has such an impact. You can certainly see why she would be so loyal to him, even though he is somewhat of a reptilian-brained sociopath.
Funny, I think of Travis Bickle, too. Although Travis Bickle didn’t dress like Alan Ladd. I always wonder just how often Jef would get stuck using ALL those keys before getting a car to start.
Right – there’s that little something that makes him seem … a little bit off (the police chief clocks it with that one line). “He’s not normal.”
Also I can’t imagine Travis Bickle keeping a chirping bird around like that – and at least judging from Jef’s apartment, he only drinks water and smokes cigarettes. Travis is a pig!
But there’s that isolation. In a way, Jef is more frightening because he does not ache to belong in the way that Travis does (and that Travis can never achieve). jef probably sensed very young that he was not like other people, and so he made life choices accordingly.
Yes, that isolation – and I’m with you – Travis desperately wants to be part of something and Jef has rejected that idea. So if Jef has decided that this is the spartan way he must live to do his job you wonder why he would choose this life. “He’s not normal,” indeed.
It’s just such a great marriage of star and director, too. Delon gave Melville just what he wanted and then took it above and beyond.
Yeah, it could have been just a “wink” of a performance – a sort of nod to Raymond Chandler, and 1930s Warner Brothers films – but it could have been all style no substance – but Delon took it to this very dark place. There’s one closeup that I find actually frightening (when he returns to the nightclub the night after the murder – the piano player looks up and sees him, and then comes the closeup of him looking back). His eyes are sort of heavy-lidded and flat – like a disinterested animal – and Delon is so gorgeous – up there with Greta Garbo as one of cinema’s best faces – but the look on his face is, frankly, inhuman in that moment.
It’s a kind of acting that I find deeply exciting. It’s Gena Rowlands territory. It’s ultimately mysterious. The work does not show at ALL.
You have to think that Melville’s war experiences contribute to and inform that darkness. I wonder if Delon played off of that at all. I’d love to read more about their collaboration. Delon was never better.
Another performance/character I find similar is Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK.
The way I see it: Melville was lucky to have Delon. That performance MAKES the movie. Otherwise, I might be impressed with its visual style but ultimately – whatever – it wouldn’t get under my skin.
You cannot easily explain away genius like Delon’s.
Like Elia Kazan said in terms of Brando: directing Brando was just a matter of getting out of his way. Anything Brando came up with was far superior than anything Kazan could have thought of. And Kazan said that himself.
I imagine that was the case with Delon as well, since he wasn’t just good in this – he was good in lots of other things.
People give WAY too much credit to directors. Not saying you are, and certainly collaborations are interesting, but way too often it’s sort of just assumed that directors “give” a performance to an actor. That is nonsense.
Or that directors are somehow responsible for a performance. They are responsible for capturing the performance on film, and editing the performance together, which is obviously key – but the really good directors know that their main job is to cast well, get out of the damn way, and know your business with the camera.
Gena Rowlands is brilliant in her husband’s films, but she’s brilliant in Another Woman, too. See Ebert’s review of Another Woman – he kind of captures some of my frustration with people who think actors “belong” to a director who has directed them in a famous role. He says it better than I do.
But even getting out of Brando’s way is a choice, as a director, and points to why Kazan was so good, too. You have to think Melville knew he had the exact perfect actor to bring Jef to life.
You’re damn right he was lucky to have him — no one else could have given the role what Delon did. I’m sure Melville thanked his lucky stars, and often. But you can’t have one without the other – it’s Melville’s material. They’re both intricately entwined in what makes it work. Melville certainly didn’t “give” the performance to him, but he did create the universe for Delon to inhabit and dominate. You can’t have LE SAMOURAI without Melville, no matter how great actor an Delon is. And, yes, the movie is unthinkable without Delon. That’s why I use the word collaboration – and they went back and made 2 more films together.
I am reacting to the overall tone of film criticism where Director is King. (You, to make myself clear, are not doing that!) Acting is seen as a lesser art, and even in big reviews the actors only get a couple of lines of text. I am happy that, so far, the places I have written for let me do my thing – and talk about the acting as much as I want to.
Also, I think acting is more mysterious. This is one of my main Missions, if you will, in my posts on movies and acting: to lessen the mystery. There are only a few people out there who I think can write about acting well. Ebert is one of them. Kim Morgan. Dan Callahan. Glenn Kenny. Imogen Smith. Farran. Pauline Kael. Other than that, you’ll see very good writers summing up a performance with one or two adjectives – because they don’t know how to talk about acting.
I cannot tell you how annoying it is to hear ignorance from people who don’t know they’re ignorant. People who watch movies for a living who have no idea what the acting craft really is. Shame on them. Aren’t they even curious? Or does it all seem just a little too Waiting for Guffman to them? People who are professional film critics using the tired “he just keeps playing himself” comment – as though that is not the #1 lesson an actor needs to learn: how to be himself in front of other people. Stupid comment, and enough for me to write someone off without reading anything else from them. There are a million other examples. Obviously I feel strongly about it – and, just to be clear, you are TOTALLY not doing that right now, and you clearly love actors and what they do.
My focus will always be on actors, as a necessary corrective to the ignorance I see almost everywhere in writing about movies.
And, yes, Kazan getting out of the way is a choice and a choice almost no other director EVER takes. And STILL people will somehow think Kazan had something to do with Marlon’s overwhelming genius – which was showing up when he was an acting student and no one knew his name.
Kazan is right to take ZERO credit for that. To take ZERO credit for that taxicab scene in On the Waterfront. Brando showed him the better way to play the scene. Brando took over, wouldn’t do it the way it was written, showed Kazan how he wanted to do it.
Way too many people out there do not understand what actors bring to a picture. The snottiness in response to actors’ speeches at the Oscars, etc., shows a deep disrespect to the craft itself. Directing seems somehow more respectable. I’ve lived in the theatrical community for 25 years, so I know it firsthand.
This is where my comments come from.
And this is why I love reading your stuff. I am always curious to understand acting better and to feel like I am always gaining a better sense of what’s brilliant and what’s crap. Or better yet – WHY something works and why something else doesn’t. …and that Bruce McGill rules.
I wish I had the Welles-Bogdanovich book in front of me – Welles has some great comments about how the stars get short-shrift in film studies.
Too funny – I thought of that Welles-Bogdanovich book just now. Welles keeps scolding Bogdanovich gently throughout: “There you go, giving credit to the director again …”
hahaha
Bruce McGill rules – I was so psyched to see him show up in Lincoln! Hell, I’m psyched to see him anywhere!
I’m not trying to imply that Delon owes his status to Melville. Certainly not – he was already a star by the time he and Melville worked together. However, certain working relationships do bring out the best in both parties.
Gena Rowlands is an interesting case – you can argue that she would have been a much bigger star had she *not* been devoted to her husband’s films. A mainstream movie star, for sure. She’s just so damn good. Don’t think her husband didn’t know it!
Gena Rowlands is an interesting case!! I mean, who the hell else would have used her in the way he used her? Nobody would ever make a movie like Woman Under the Influence except for Cassavetes. And, of course, it will be for those roles that she will always be known.
I am very grateful to Cassavetes for putting together these crazy “vehicles” for his crazy wife to let her Freak Flag fly. It is very hard to think of her finding similar projects in mainstream cinema at the time.
And Ebert’s point was: seeing her in Another Woman shows that she was a genius actress. When working with Cassavetes, she was wild-eyed and neurotic and unpredictable. When working with Allen, she was subdued and repressed – and was equally believable.
It’s really astonishing.
If you only watched her in Cassavetes’ films, you may be forgiven for thinking that she could only do that one kind of part. But Allen saw something else in her. How amazing is that??
Sheila, I just always assumed she could do anything.
Ha. Me too. But I think at the time that wasn’t the case. She was so associated with Cassavetes and all those mad women. A less visionary director than Allen would have given her the Betty Buckley part in Another Woman, or the Sandy Dennis part – women on the edge.
But he felt her conservatism, he felt her buttoned-up nature, or at least knew she could tap into that as well!
It’s like Maggie Smith. She can do anything.
Also, there seems to be something special in the rapport between Melville and Delon. I keep trying to find some interview snippets of one of them talking about the other. The photos of them together are always great – maybe it was nothing, but it just seems as if they had a rare chemistry as artists and friends.
I think it’s true that actors feel so lucky when they find a simpatico director. There are so many examples of actors who kind of flounder until a director gives them a role that hits the sweet spot. There is definitely an alchemical kind of reaction going on. Directors have Muses, you can see that at work, too. They have good luck charms, they have affinity with certain TYPES of actors. I’ve been watching a lot of Christian Petzold’s films recently (4 in the last week) – and he has worked with Nina Hoss 4 times – they obviously love working together. She’s different in each film, too. Who knows if another director would “see” in her what he does. It’s a very special relationship – and I think a lot of actors suffer who DON’T find that director-relationship. They sort of float around, freelancing – but their careers lack focus.
I have always found sociopathic underworld-type characters interesting. When I watch Travis Bickle, I writhe in sympathetic pain with him. When I watch Jef Costello, I want to flee in the other direction.
There’s a quote in a book by an FBI profiler (who came up with the Psychopath Profile used everywhere now) – that has to do with the effect a psychopath has on the people he comes into contact with. It’s physical, not emotional. It’s fight-or-flight. There have been studies done. You know you are in the presence of something dangerous. You should trust your gut.
I’ll find the quote when i get home. Delon embodies that.
His unbelievable beauty makes the whole thing even more destabilizing.
In Le Samourai, Delon is not handsome: He’s beautiful. In an almost feminine way. He is glamorous looking. Heartachingly beautiful.
And yet there’s something so repellant about him in the film. Genius!
Okay, Sheila, I’ll ask you this, since you’re mentioning Delon’s astonishing looks: what if someone had given Elvis a part like this? It’s something I always wonder about.
So weird that you said that, Matt!! I flashed on Elvis when I saw Le Samourai.
Delon has a similar beauty – like it’s just not normal to be that beautiful. People have weird reactions to it. I have weird reactions to it.
I think Elvis would have been great in a gloomy noir. King Creole has noir aspects, and he’s awesome in that!
and if I’m not mistaken – that was Delon’s real-life wife in le Samourai?
How could the two even bear their own beauty together?
I don’t know much about Delon as a person. Do you?
Elvis Costello?
Presley, n’est ce pas!
Sheila, thank you. I love this film.
Of course there is Delon’s unearthly beauty, like a pearl in the middle of that dingy room. That’s what makes the line up scenes so, well, funny – as if anyone could forget seeing a face like that.
That face so blank, that the faintest sign of emotion seems to cross it like a lightning bolt.
I love the scene in the police station where everyone swaps coats and hats – choreographed like a dance. As if what mattered for identification was the right combination of film noir accoutrements – the icon of noir – rather than the person inside.
The scene where they plant the HUGE bug! Pure vaudeville.
The chase in the metro – it’s amazing how this just hasn’t dated, despite the big telephones and map with little lights like from a spoof spy movie. The tension in this scene is incredible.
The scene where he returns home and dresses the wound, wakes up and dresses it again. The aloneness, the stoicism of it. There’s another film where he does this, Les Insoumis – try and dig clips of it out on youtube – it just seems to be something Delon could evoke really powerfully, that determination in having to deal with intense pain.
Don’t know much about Delon in real life – but apparently a complicated and controversial figure, especially in later life. He and Melville definitely spiritually bonded, though.
Can I suggest another Delon film you might get your teeth into – Monsieur Klein, by Joseph Losey.
So much to respond to, Helena – I love it!!
Yes, that giant bug on the wall – so funny. Like, guys, try to put it in a less inconspicuous place, why don’t you! I loved that sequence.
The chase through the Metro is exhilarating: I loved the little lights coming up on the map of Paris.
Funny you should mention the sequence where he dresses the wound in the kitchen: that may be my favorite scene in the whole picture. It’s so meticulous, so abstract.
And yet so physical. That moment where he gets back inside his crappy little room and just lets himself collapse against the door with a little outbreath, you see the effort it’s taken to get there, to maintain the controlled exterior until now. The dirty coat, the dishevelled hair, so incredibly, um … I think it would take an essay length post to unpick exactly what effect it has on my insides, so I’ll leave it just there.
Yes! I think that is one of Delon’s aces in the hole: capable of great stillness, but then also capable of sudden bursts of movement. It’s SO effective.
Like the standoff on the walkway with the guy who hired him. It’s all very still, the two of them just staring at one another, and then – in a flash, Delon attacks. It still gets to me.
and of course his swan dive in the last scene. Brilliant.
I think one reason why that scene stands out for me is because it’s the moment when Delon’s character becomes human, rather than that an unearthly machine. He becomes a person with a body which can be hurt, rather than a beautiful frame for crisp shirts and snap brim fedoras.
Also, I love Melville’s colour palette in this film and also Red Circle and Army of Shadows – desaturated, deep reds, blues, greys, nicotine browns, everything stands out like a statue, clearly delineated, there’s no blurriness. Except right at the beginning where there’s that slight zooming in and out, or expansion and contraction of the image of the room until Delon emerges from the bed. Melville really plays on the contrast between the seedy interiors and Delon’s personal elegance.
That slight zooming in and zooming out is so great – great psychological filmmaking. Destabilizing to the audience – kinda like the slight jumpcuts Cassavetes uses (and others).
Yes, and Delon’s elegance – the way he looks at his watch (the face of it on the inside of his wrist), his almost feminine delicacy with how he deals with that keychain, and the way he deals with his clothes before he goes out – is just great when contrasted with him in his T shirt pouring iodine on his wound, his fist clenching up.
So so fascinated by this character.
I can’t help but imagine (yes, I will say it!!) what Jef Costello is like in bed.
I wonder if he is the opposite of his detached self in bed. Or maybe he is mostly celibate, because women, in general, would be drawn to his beauty but turned off by the Creep “not normal” factor. Who knows.
Like I said – the one tender moment he has with his girlfriend at the end, when he suddenly reaches out to touch her and kiss her ear – it seems quite heartfelt to me. Maybe other women demanded too much of him, his heart, his soul – or were baffled by his strangeness and wanted him to be more like other men – this woman clearly understood exactly who he was. He could rely on her.
He seemed … perturbed … when he found out the cops hassled her. (Of course it’s hard to say that Jef Costello is ‘feeling’ anything remotely normal – but his couple of questions in that last scene he has with her: “did they hassle you?” “because of me?” … Maybe I’m projecting, but I think he feels bad about that, and also very much appreciates her loyalty and that he can kind of be his weird self with her. She doesn’t expect him to suddenly be a normal man with a loving heart.)
What do you think about that? What are your thoughts on his relationship to his girlfriend?
I don’t think she’s just a dumb woman he uses to set up his alibi. He knows he can trust her, and he is not wrong in that. So there’s SOMEthing there.
.. and agree with your comments on Melville’s use of color. That apartment – the greyness of it – compared to the regular recognizable Paris we see in the exteriors … it really is a masterpiece, that particular set.
I agree with you about the girlfriend. I get the vibe from these characters that they are both emotionally tough, and know their boundaries with each other. Part of the reason he uses her as an alibi is that he knows he can rely on her utterly. Which is correct, she doesn’t break, keeps her composure thoughout the scene where she is interrogated even though it becomes increasingly creepy and threatening – the cop more or less calling her a prostitute (she is a call girl, I guess and Costello’s a killer for hire, – vive la difference. Point is, he’s a professional, and consorts with professionals.) So not clingy, not needy, otherwise she just wouldn’t be in his life at all. Which makes that final scene between her and Costello rather touching. He’s a man who lives by rigid codes and rules, knows he has dragged her into something much deeper than he intended, yet more fallout from this disastrous job, and she’s better off with him off the scene. But still, he regrets it.
Oh, and she rocks a mean nightie.
More mysterious, or mythical, is this thing with the jazz musician. She unmistakably sees him, doesn’t identify him to the police and he becomes fascinated by her. Nemesis? Remember that scene right at the beginning where he’s in his car and a very chic lady driver tries to flirt with him? Not a man to bother with female distractions when on a paid gig. But this other woman somehow drags him to his doom. Would welcome your thoughts.
As for Costello in bed – well, he does seem to spend a lot of time in bed, as in, just lying down, waiting, resting, thinking, planning. But as a sexual being? Interesting to try and imagine!
I’m going to have to watch this again tonight.
Love the music, too.
I’ll stop gushing now.
Will definitely return to discuss the fascinating relationship with the pianist!
This is fun! I wish I wasn’t busy right now.
The ending is still a shock to me. And yes, he turns the car off. He knows he won’t come out of that club alive. And, of course, as we discover with the gun, he wasn’t going to go through with it anyway – which is FASCINATING.
I am curious about her, too. The way he says, “Merci, madameoisell”, when she fails to identify him at the police station. The way he says it is strangely intimate. He owes her in some way.
That’s a great moment with the flirty woman in the other car. Melville’s camera zooms in on her, reveling in her gorgeousness – and then he cuts back to Delon who stares at her with detached disinterest. Maybe Costello thinks: “she’s pretty” – but he would never pursue it. It’s just not part of his code.
His energy is always focused. It leaves no room for anything else. He lies on his bed and smokes, and then when he goes outside, he theatrically puts on his coat, his hat – never a smile, never a softening of the coiled tension. It’s tempting to “diagnose” him. David Thomson refers to him as “schizophrenic” in his piece on Delon in Le Samourai in his Encyclopedia of Film – and I wonder where he got that. I wasn’t getting schizophrenia at all.
In a way, he’s like an alien – someone who has never learned the trick of being human, even though he looks like us and seems like us. That’s why it’s so interesting to see him in that one exchange with his girlfriend at the end – the only time we see even a glimpse of tenderness, or humanness.
I also love how the police force is able to deploy literally hundreds of people to chase/track this man through the subway. Like: this guy didn’t assassinate a world leader. Why the crazy dragnet?? But I love that. It’s ironic, it’s fun.
I’m so angry at David Thomson after reading his hatchet job on HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY in “Have You Seen…?” I know the guy has it in for Ford, but it was just such crap.
And he’s pretty awful about women growing older. He can’t forgive them for no longer being pleasing to HIS eye. Classic male gaze.
Sometimes I love his stuff, but sometimes he’s way off.
And yeah, his John Ford stuff is enraging.
I like your phrase ‘the trick of being human’ and no, I don’t get schizophrenic at all – what’ s Thomson’s line of reasoning?
For a long time I’ve watched the film and just seen Costello as this quintessential, almost Borgesian character who simply doesn’t require backstory or even psychologising, though that’s great fun to do. He is simply there – anachronistically gliding around 1968 Paris like the angel of death until he realises he can’t escape his own fate and chooses to walk towards it instead. It’s interesting start seeing him as a character with a real psychology – the genius of it is how much empty space there is to fill with our own speculation.
And yes, that subway chase is fantastic – the sense of lurking menace created by the rustle of a newspaper, a glance, something, someone not quite in the right place. Great suspense
Helena – I certainly think the character is most interesting and effective when you remove the need for backstory, or some clinical diagnosis. There are a couple of closeups, as I mentioned, that are very frightening, due to the black nothing-ness of his beautiful face. SUCH good acting.
And the title of the film is also resonant in an ironic and commenting-upon way. Jef Costello obviously knows that he is probably not long for this world. He doesn’t seem to have any feelings about that one way or the other – and goes to the nightclub in that final scene with the knowledge he won’t come out.
Like, he doesn’t pick up his hat check stub. He won’t be needing it again.
Melville filmed two endings – one where Delon died with a smile on his face. But he decided to go this other way, and I’m glad of it – although the smile I think would also have been interesting and mysterious.
What did you make of LE CERCLE ROUGE? I need to watch it again soon.
Haven’t seen it yet. very tired these days. I will.
Have a bunch of writing to get done this weekend. Maybe I’ll have some time then. Not sure.
Take your time – it’s not going anywhere! Hopefully by the time you get to it, it will be fresh for me too.