Le Samourai (1967)
First, the Lowdown: A French hitman suddenly finds himself a target.
Jef leads a solitary life. The only other occupant of his sparse apartment is a small finch in a cage. Leaving his home, he walks the streets waiting for a car to steal. He takes it to a garage in the outskirts. The garage owner switches the car's plates and then hands Jef a gun. He takes the tainted car to the apartment of Jane, a woman he has been seeing behind the back of her fiance. Once there he tells her when he has arrived and how long he's stayed there, but Jane tells him that her fiance is arriving that night. So Jef alters his story by 15 minutes and then leaves. He arrives at a dingy hotel and checks in with a group of men playing cards. (“Bring cash, in case you lose,” one jests.) Jef leaves the men to their game and finally arrives at a night club. After surveying the club, he sneaks into the back office and shoots the club owner. As he leaves the scene of the murder, the first person he sees in the corridor is Valerie, the pianist of the club's jazz ensemble. Jef makes a hasty departure that catches the attention of a barman and the coat-check girl of the club. The job now completed, Jef disposes of both the gun and his stolen car, then returns to Jane's apartment about 5 minutes before Wiener, Jane's fiance, arrives – and then leaves with enough emphasis to the other man know he was there.
Back at the club, the police are scouring the murder scene for clues. The Superintendent requests 20 suspects from every precinct, knowing that the longer they take to investigate, the more likely they'll lose the killer. During the sweep, Jef is picked up at the card game in the hotel because he matches the loose description of the killer: young, wearing a raincoat and hat. At the central precinct over a hundred men are grilled as to their whereabouts, a handful are picked out for having a weapon on their person. In a line-up Jef is recognized by two of the club patrons – but not by Valerie. The police call in Jane and Wiener for questioning, Jane however stands by her story that Jef was with her during the time of the murder. The superintendent doesn't believe it, however. But even after thorough questioning, the police are forced to let Jef go.
Out on the street, the police have Jef tailed, but he loses them on the Metro. Later in the day he meets up with his contact to receive the other half of his payment for the hit – but the man tries to kill him because he was arrested. In the scuffle, Jef gets shot in the arm and the courier escapes. Back at police headquarters, the superintendent is more determined than ever to arrest Jef, but he has no evidence. So now Jef must sidestep the police on his tail and his trigger-happy former employers. Yet beyond all of that lies the question: why did the only eyewitness to the crime refuse to finger him?
Le Samourai is a superb movie. For a movie that's only an hour and 45 minutes, it feels longer than that – and I mean that in a good way. Much is communicated by expression and action, where most other directors would use dialog to further the plot. And yet without being explicitly told anything about our main character, Jef, we learn so much about his character without having it spoon-fed to us.
And for a movie with so little in the way of actual spoken dialog, there are very few characters that could be considered one-dimensional. The more we see Jef, our hitman, in action, the more we realize that he adheres to a strict code of business ethics – one, as he eventually learns, is not shared by the people who hired him. And yet none of this is told by Jef to any of the other characters explicitly – rather it's demonstrated by his actions.
It's director Jean-Pierre Melville's ability to show his audience the story instead of telling it to us that is something one rarely finds in cinema anymore. No more than the barest minimum is said by the actors, and even then when it is absolutely necessary. It's become an obsession of modern action directors to bombard the audience with casual-sounding dialog in replacement of actual storytelling. I think a lot of action movies would benefit from using the action to play out the story instead of contrived speech.
Line of the movie: “I never lose. Not really.”
Five stars. Ribbed for her pleasure.
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