Le Doulos

Maurice is just out of prison and preparing a robbery. Silien is somewhere in the middle of it and nobody knows which side he is on. The job goes wrong, the police are there, and everyone assumes Silien informed. From that point the film withholds who did what to whom until the last moment. Jean-Pierre Melville directed. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien and Serge Reggiani plays Maurice. The title carries two meanings at once. In French slang a doulos is a kind of hat; in the same slang it also means the man wearing it, the informer. Melville put the hat at the centre: Belmondo keeps his fedora and overcoat on for the first hour and only takes them off when he enters a nightclub. The most cited scene is set in a police station. A stretch of about five minutes was shot in a single take, the camera constantly reframing as it circles between Belmondo and the detectives questioning him. In another scene a handheld camera follows two characters right onto the Paris metro. It sold 485,186 tickets in Paris and 1,475,391 across France, making it Melville's second highest-grossing film at that point after Leon Morin, Priest. French critics praised the technique, the sobriety and the elliptical narration. Quentin Tarantino has called this screenplay his personal favourite and one of the largest influences on Reservoir Dogs. Who it is for: viewers who like French crime cinema and unreliable narration. Who it is not for: anyone who cares how the women are handled. The film uses them almost entirely as material for the plot.