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| A gritty poster for Jean-Pierre Melville's The Red Circle |
QUICK REVIEW:
The film starts with two convicts achieving freedom: One is released, the other escapes his transport on a train with a plan: Along with an ex-cop with ballistic expertise, he will rob a jewelery store.
Great French director Jean-Pierre Melville's (The Gambler/Bob le Flambeur (1956)) film-language is extremely minimalistic in this hyper-elegant heist thriller, both in terms of dialog, the drawing of the characters and the music and lack of same: SPOILER The approximately 20 minutes long heist scene takes place in almost absolute silence.
The three thugs, dark Alain Delon (Rocco and His Brothers/Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (1960)) in particular, appear as cold and professional opposite the skilled inspector (crooked-nosed André Bourvil (The Longest Day (1962)) and his cynical boss; ("All men are guilty.")
The Red Circle is a solid, elegant, uncommonly downplayed crime serving that curries no favor with us in terms of romance or other sentimentalities.
A fun fact about it is that the Buddha quote in the the film's epigraph, which sort of explains the film's title, was entirely made up by Melville himself.
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| Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's The Red Circle |
Watch the cool, original, French trailer for the film here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: 0.3 mil. $ (2003 US re-release)
= Uncertainty
[The film had many admissions in its own country France (4.3 mil.) and seems to have done very well in Italy (1,350 mil. lire). Whether this makes it a hit on its initial release or not is not certain. It enjoyed a long American re-release in '03 (January-September) on a few screens and has a fan in great Chinese action director John Woo (Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)).]
What do you think of The Red Circle?
What's Melville's best film in your opinion?
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