Yet another of Jean-Pierre Melville's hommages to the American gangster genre. There is, as always, an ever-present element of playacting about it -- these European actors in their I-Am-a-Hoodlum uniforms -- but the "play" maintains a childlike seriousness and unselfconsciousness and freedom from irony. And if the modern-day moviegoer should find it too long and too slow, it will simply be a measure of Melville's greater faith in the form. This is the slowness of ceremony, the longness of time-honored tradition. The most noteworthy innovation this time -- the most sizable contribution to the lore -- comes in the characterization of Yves Montand, a sullied ex-cop. When we first see him, sweaty and unshaven, he's in the throes of a severe case of the d.t.'s (one step beyond Ray Milland), his room aswarm with phantom snakes, lizards, spiders, rats. The phone rings, and he is invited to a meeting to discuss a possible job in which his legendary skills as a sharpshooter are required. When next we see him, he turns up at the meeting freshly shaven in a snappy suit and tie, declines the offer of a whisky ("I never touch it"), and throughout the entire enterprise, taking target practice, lighting a cigarette, brewing up a special batch of soft lead for bullets, there's never a tremor, never a mention, never a hint. Upon completion of his assignment, he removes a flask from his pocket, takes one whiff, puts it away. Not very realistic, you say? Certainly not. It's sublime -- a glorious salute to criminal professionalism or to professionalism in general. Melville's own professionalism, on the other hand, has elsewhere been more secure. The opening, admittedly, is nicely structured, cross-cutting between the converging paths of a paroled convict and an escaped convict who, after their paths come together in the parking lot of a roadside diner, will team up on a big jewel heist ("classic, easy, no risk"). And the cold, monochromatic, colorless color brings to mind the palette of Le Samourai (same cameraman, Henri Decae), without quite equalling it. And some of the images possess an elegant geometry. But partially negating all of that is the profusion of lazy zoom shots -- so much easier than a tracking shot or two separate camera set-ups, so much flimsier -- which date the movie with great accuracy at 1970, and which date it rather badly. Not that they were much more palatable at the time. The last thing we ever want from Jean-Pierre Melville is that he be in vogue. Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonte, André Bourvil. (1970) — Duncan Shepherd