Le Dou­los (1962)

This exces­sive­ly cheer­less polici­er from 1962 sits smack dab at the cen­tre of Jean-Pierre Melville’s career as a writer and direc­tor of mus­cu­lar films about bewitch­ing anti-heros and the arti­sans of France’s crim­i­nal under­world. As an open­ing inter-title explains, Le Dou­los is a slang term for ​“hat”, but also dou­bles as ​“rat”, used to refer to snitch­es and paid infor­mants. If you’re a rat, Melville thinks you’ve got what’s com­ing to you.

The ques­tion posed by this ver­bose and not entire­ly sat­is­fy­ing work is: whose side is Jean-Paul Belmondo’s shady rogue, Silien, real­ly on? Is he stump­ing for sad-sack recidi­vist Mau­rice (Serge Reg­giani), who exe­cutes and robs a dis­hon­ourable jew­el thief as his first order of busi­ness hav­ing been just been released from prison? Or is Silien pre­tend­ing to be Maurice’s bud­dy in order to feed infor­ma­tion of this sucker’s ongo­ing crim­i­nal endeav­ours to the fuzz?

Melville makes no bones about induct­ing mur­der­ous Mau­rice in as the trag­ic hero of the piece, while the police, using every trick in the play­book to curb this one-man crime­wave, are seen are the bureau­crat­ic, under­hand antag­o­nists. In Melville’s world, law-enforce­ment is depict­ed as dis­hon­ourable and unro­man­tic – it’s too black and white when it comes to basic right and wrongs. There’s no deep­er con­sid­er­a­tion when it comes to look­ing at the intri­ca­cies of men try­ing to set­tle their deal­ings with blood and fists. And why should one group of men be above the law, while anoth­er are shack­led by it?

The crims, mean­while, are for­giv­en their sins because of the lengths they even­tu­al­ly go to in order to uphold an unwrit­ten code of hon­our, where only the self­ish and need­less­ly cru­el receive the pun­ish­ment they clear­ly deserve. Kind-faced Reg­giani isn’t the type of actor you’d cast as an evil crook, so its rel­a­tive­ly easy to fall on side (he only kills real­ly bad guys). Bel­mon­do, how­ev­er, is a more slip­pery fish, deliv­er­ing a per­for­mance that is, to quote Tom Waits, cold­er than a well-digger’s ass.

And still, this one is very much a sec­ond-tier Melville effort, as it often leans too hard on lengthy, cold­ly expo­si­tion­al dia­logue pas­sages which are sapped of any real dra­ma or inten­si­ty. So adamant is the writer-direc­tor to make sure he has all his moral ducks in a row, that he takes great pains to make cer­tain that every small impulse is ratio­nalised, and it’s often to the detri­ment of any real emo­tion or ener­gy. A stretch which comes before the final act is pure expla­na­tion – had this tale been adapt­ed for the screen in the US cir­ca 1940, it’s hard to see how it would’ve tak­en more than a crisp and curt 70 min­utes, includ­ing credits.