Le Cercle Rouge

A French crime film. A man is released from prison. He is given a name and an address on the way out by the guard who has been taking his money. At the same time another man escapes from a train while being escorted by a police inspector. He runs through fields and hides in the boot of a car, and the car belongs to the man just released. They do not discuss it much. A third man is brought in, a former policeman thrown out for drinking, who can shoot. From there the film builds to a jewellery robbery on the Place Vendôme. The robbery runs almost half an hour with no dialogue at all. Locks, an alarm, a rifle shot at a precise point, and three men working in silence. The police plot runs alongside. The inspector is patient, uses informers and pressure, and the film gives him as much time as it gives the thieves. What the narrative is interested in is not the crime but manner: everyone behaves according to a code, nobody explains themselves, and the film is about how they carry that. The look is deliberate and drained. Grey-blue interiors, trench coats and hats, and almost no music. Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté and Yves Montand play the three. Bourvil, best known in France as a comic actor, plays the inspector against type; he died shortly after the film was released. Jean-Pierre Melville directed. The epigraph about a red circle, attributed in the film to an eastern source, was written by Melville himself. Who it is for: anyone who likes patient, cold heist films and their influence on later cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who wants speed; the film is long, slow, and deliberately unemotional.