Círculo Rojo

Jean-Pierre Melville's terrifically enjoyable noir classic looks even cooler with this reissue.

Today, what sets Melville apart -- aside from his meticulous compositions and inspired pacing -- is that, for all his wit and wry self-knowledge, his existentialism was no pose. He was absolutely alive to the philosophical implications of "Le Cercle Rouge." Notions of fate, doom and honor were more important to him than the style aspect of guys in suits and hats carrying guns.

Gliding almost without speech down the dawn streets of a wet Paris winter, these men in trench coats and fedoras perform a ballet of crime, hoping to win and fearing to die. Some are cops and some are robbers. To smoke for them is as natural as breathing. They use guns, lies, clout, greed and nerve with the skill of a magician who no longer even thinks about the cards. They share a code of honor which is not about what side of the law they are on, but about how a man must behave to win the respect of those few others who understand the code.

Although it's been largely agreed on by critics that Le Cercle Rouge was an artistic high-water mark for Jean-Pierre Melville, grandmaster of the coolly desaturated gangster epic, it's of greater note that the French filmmaker's 12th film was his greatest commercial success. Starring three of Europe's most unassailably suave leading men, it was the apex of Melville's style, a leisurely yet unerringly precise and enveloping masculine tragedy that took on the guise of a cat-and-mouse procedural. Its success promised everything for the 53-year-old Melville, including one of his dream projects: an action film based on Maurice Leblanc's series of books concerning Arsene Lupin, a gentleman thief whose adventures were as admired in France as much as Sherlock Holmes's.