Near the end of Le Doulos Belmondo sits in a bar and explains the entire plot of the film to Reggiano. This takes ten minutes or more and involves numerous brief flashbacks which force Reggiano and the viewer to reassess all Belmondo's perverse and vicious acts of the last hour or so of screen time as an expression of profound friendship. This is a very dull scene. It's also a useful scene because it reveals the true nature of this film, not a French film noir besotted with the American 40s films, but a Miss Marple mystery in noir clothing.
Melville has captured all the surface qualities of film noir. Check out the marvellous opening sequence of Reggiano walking to the beat of the title music (rather like Travolta in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever) along some railway lines to arrive at the kind of weird little house peculiar to french films. But, Melville's film doesn't seem to get hold of the deeper sensibility of the 40s classics in the way that Chinatown and Bladerunner do (for example). The central character is not experiencing a crisis of morality and/or identity in an incomprehensible and amoral world, rather he is a scumbag in a scummy world. It makes for unengaging watching.
Maybe this is a world Melville wanted to depict, but in the end Le Doulos is a tiresome whodunnit. It's gritty, or more accurately misogynist and nasty, and often great to look at, but this is not a lesser known should be classic.
Melville has captured all the surface qualities of film noir. Check out the marvellous opening sequence of Reggiano walking to the beat of the title music (rather like Travolta in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever) along some railway lines to arrive at the kind of weird little house peculiar to french films. But, Melville's film doesn't seem to get hold of the deeper sensibility of the 40s classics in the way that Chinatown and Bladerunner do (for example). The central character is not experiencing a crisis of morality and/or identity in an incomprehensible and amoral world, rather he is a scumbag in a scummy world. It makes for unengaging watching.
Maybe this is a world Melville wanted to depict, but in the end Le Doulos is a tiresome whodunnit. It's gritty, or more accurately misogynist and nasty, and often great to look at, but this is not a lesser known should be classic.