“WHAT KIND OF MAN ARE YOU?” asks jazz club pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier) of paid assassin Jef Costello (Alain Delon) as they drive together in her black-with-red-leather-interior Chevy Camaro through the glittering, rain-swept streets of Paris. Jef does not answer.
When American cinema audiences first met Jef Costello—director Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish, taciturn hit man—it was under an assumed name. Rather than the direct, and patently obvious, translation of the 1967 French title as The Samurai, the film first screened in the US in July 1972 billed as The Godson, a shallow cash-grab for the coattails of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, which had been packing theaters since March of the same year. The print shown was even blasphemously overdubbed in English, eroding the existentialist poetry of the sparse dialogue captured in the Francophone cut. Despite this misguided commercially motivated sabotage, the power of Melville’s imagery was impossible to repress. Exposure to this now legendary work fed the eyes and ambitions of generations of cinema’s next-wave talents, stirring up an inchoate longing to create something of their own time that could speak to this level of film craft.
What made Melville’s mise-en-scèneso potent? Perhaps because, in addition to his obsessive attention to the violent, cynical, and often hastily made studio crime films of the 1940s and ’50s, latterly categorized by critics as “film noir,” Melville himself was an active WWII combatant and Resistance operative who had seen death and duplicity in full color and extreme close-up, not just as fictive flickering in black and white. The admirer turned auteur subsequently built an independent career by repurposing the hard-boiled tropes of American postwar anxiety into devastatingly cool French cinema. Le Samouraï’s simple “lone hit man betrayed” plot and the styling of the protagonist Jef are acknowledged to be in direct homage to Alan Ladd’s light-eyed, animal-friendly killer of 1942’s This Gun for Hire. By deliberately out-noiring noir, Melville might have brought coals to Newcastle—but through the pressure of his exacting aesthetic vision, he turned Hollywood’s rough-hewn rocks into diamonds.
Today, Le Samouraï is recognized as a foundational example of neo-noir, and as a spark that lit a fire under Scorsese, Mann, Tarantino, Jarmusch, Woo, Fincher, et al.—see Taxi Driver (1976), Thief (1981), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Ghost Dog (1999), The Killer (1989), and The Killer (2023). Even the Matrix and John Wick franchises are suffused with references to its cult mythology: aloof antiheroes with sharp suits and slick autos pursued on all sides as they stalk through moody cityscapes, inescapably hurtling toward the violent resolution of their own personal destiny? Check. Such respect and veneration from his American and international peers was something the Stetson- and Ray-Ban-sporting Melville, who functioned as something of a godfather to Jean-Luc Godard and the nascent French New Wave, would have been pleased to receive. Unfortunately, his own dramatic personal destiny was to intervene. In 1973, at only fifty-five, the filmmaker suffered a fatal heart attack over lunch while discussing his next picture—a spy thriller set to star Yves Montand and Catherine Deneuve, never to witness the explosive chain reaction in mainstream cinema that his unapologetic, maverick methods had set off.
The release of a brand-new digital 4K restoration of Le Samouraï from Pathé and the Criterion Collection, crafted at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna from the original 35-mm negative, means that 2024 audiences can now immerse themselves in the purest version of the director’s vision. (It’s in French, of course, with subtitles that preserve the nuanced Parisian underground argot.)
And so what kind of man is the titular samurai, Jef Costello, as immaculately embodied by Delon? Melville’s masterful visual coding permeates every frame, presenting a series of semiotic cues and clues for the receptive viewer to decipher. Delon delivers up a sympathetic hit man who has our support from the very first moment we enter his smoky room. That ever-so-famous, ever-so-slow, delicate, and very dark opening shot communicates everything we need to know about him long before we come to realize that his chosen profession is mercenary-for-hire. A man out of the past with no explicit backstory, he is—like Melville himself—a maverick set on his own course. Dashing through the labyrinthine Paris Métro in a trench coat, he’s an anachronistic romantic archetype. But above all, he’s a paradox. He pockets wads of gangsters’ cash, says that he kills “because he is paid to” but lives like a monk, renting a barely furnished garçonniére, his hoard of folded franc banknotes stacked precariously inside the fireplace. Symbolism much? The somber chamber is also home to a tiny caged bird that he tends to with care; or is the pet merely a practical paranoid’s low-maintenance alarm system? The flawless new print makes these subtle elements even more evident. Through sublime in-camera composition, each shadowy atmosphere is a thing of mysterious beauty.
As is the elegant Valérie, who fulfills the noir trope of nightclub singer. However, the statuesque performer at the exclusive Martey’s jazz lounge does not sing a single note, either inside the chic monochrome boîte or at the modernist black-and-anthracite police station while under interrogation by gray-suited detectives. Rather, she is set up as Jef’s mirror opposite—the two are equally stylish, but where he is deliberately nondescript, she glows, resplendent in silver sequins or lush ocelot. When Delon’s defiant aquamarine eyes meet their match in Rosier’s unflinching espresso noisette gaze, the certainties of his solitary existence collapse. During their dawn exchange in an art- and antiquity-filled apartment, she plays piano wrapped in a black silk kimono: clearly the perfect soul mate for The Samurai. Because Jef, too, is an artist; he plays the entire city like a piano, skillfully striking chords that can conjure up an alibi, new license plates, or a circlet of factory-duplicate Citroën car keys. His haunting score turns out to be a threnody. What truly happened to Costello to create the brutal assassin we observe in such efficient action? We will never know. What I do know is that every second it’s projected up on the big screen makes you appreciate Le Samouraï anew. It’s a must-see, or see-again, film, an essentially sexy classic that can sustain repeat viewing. Take your chance to stay up all night with a young Alain Delon. Even if he is an ice-cold exterminating angel drawn inexorably toward his own dissolution, I still leave the cinema thinking: “I can fix him.”
The Le Samouraï 4K restoration is brought to North America by Janus Films and will play at select art-house cinemas throughout the spring of 2024 before a screening at the Maine International Film Festival in July.
