Anti-Heroes: Le Samourai (Dir Jean-Pierre Melville, 1h45m, 1967)

No-one does the cinematic anti-hero like the French. Here they come in suit and tie, the iconic Belmondo in Godard's Breathless (1960); or or from the same year, in Bogart's trenchcoat, like Aznavour in Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player),  Lino Ventura in Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques, or later, both played by Belmondo, the unorthodox detective in Le Marginal, (dir. Jacques Deray, 1983) and as wronged secret agent in The Professional (dir. Georges Lautner, 1981), both in leather jackets, with a gun nonchalantly tucked into their waistband. Belmondo is cool, was cool, will always be cool. Delon is cooler. You admire Jean-Paul Belmondo; you want to be Alain Delon, at least the celluloid version. Above all, you - and a lot of actors you and I have heard of, and I have discussed before, really want to be Delon in Le Samouraï. Who wouldn't?

Here, Delon plays a hitman, Jef Costello, suspected, after a hit is witnessed by several patrons of a nightclub, and he is regarded as compromised, by the police and viewed by his gangster employers as a liability, who send a gunman to deal with him. Trying to hunt the hitman sent to kill him and tie up loose ends, Jef is himself hunted by the circling Paris police. All of this is complicated by the presence of nightclub pianist Valérie (Cathy Rosier), and Costello's girlfriend, Jane - Nathalie Delon, in her only film with her husband, the two divorcing months later - both of them providing alibis to the hitman. Le Samourai's plot itself has been appropriated by Anton Corbjin in The American (2010); it is a nigh perfect mechanism - the hit takes place in the first few minutes of the film, the mechanism winds, as the police investigate, before further violence, and the increasing presence of the law sees events spiral out of control. 

From the first sequence of the film, Costello lying on his bed, as a (fictitious and entirely invented by Melville) quotation from the 'Le Bushido' appears on screen, smoke from a lit cigarette drifting into the air as the jazzy noirish score by François de Roubaix replaces the tweeting of the bird whose cage is the only other furniture in the sole room. We are in a very different world than the previous French anti-heroes. It all starts with Delon; this is an exercise in minimalism. Delon's iconic trenchcoat for example - not just the armour of this modern-day Samurai but simple and stark - blacks, whites and greys that, at points, if not for the pale face impassively gazing out at the world from beneath a grey fedora, almost feels like Delon has stepped out of the black and white era, a visitor from a different age with his own moral code and unreadable demeanour. It's all impossibly cool. 

Yet that trenchcoat and fedora, both of which Delon would make the rage of Paris and beyond, tell us more than an eye for sharp fashion and a sharper silhouette, seen many times over in films ever since, but a window into his character. Jef otherwise reveals little, his actions speaking far louder, and more directly than any line of dialogue he utters - the first of these isn't till ten minutes in, and the film is sparse on speech anyway, with less than 500 lines total. This is a man of precise action, the dressing in coat and hat a ritual, a samurai preparing for battle; yet detached from the world around him, despite his attraction to both Jane and Valérie, the latter of which will lead to his ruin.. An early scene sees him impassive when briefly watched from a neighbouring car by a female admirer, whilst the bare flat, the cars he steals and abandons with the enigmatic and colossal ring of keys, the fashionable suits, all facets of a man that seems adrift in the modern age.

Yet, for all of this minimalism, all of this self-imposed isolation, we find ourself in a world that largely feels like an extension of Costello's cell, a world of muted colours that still feels effortlessly stylish via Henri Decaë's cinematography. Costello is still a riveting protagonist, his moral code, his samurai ethic, underpinning his every action, from his first moments on screen, to his last - at once ultra-cool and a starkly minimalist performance, the anti-hero made icon, menswear trendsetter, and cinematic influence for decades to come. Many directors have been influenced by Le Samouraï - the jacket and moral code reappear with Ryan Gosling's nameless, laconic protagonist in Winding Refn's Drive (2011), the ethos re-emerges in De Niro's Travis Bickle, Ronin's Sam, and Heat's Neil McCauley, and characters from the protagonist of John Woo's The Killer (1989) and Tom Cruise in Collateral have openly emulated Jef Costello. 

But you can't be Delon. Nobody can, though many have tried, and his copyists are innumerable. You especially can't be Delon in Le Samouraï . No document of his icy presence, his visual impact, his 'less is more' acting sensibility, is as cinematically cool, as perfect an encapsulation of why everyone from Tarantino to Coppola to Mann and Jarmusch return time and again to view this masterclass of the French anti-hero. Nothing is cooler than Le Samouraï, and its iconic take on the anti-hero.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Le Samouraï can be watched on AppleTV and is available on BluRay from Criterion

Next week we go looking for America and find Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson travelling in Easy Rider.