Best Ever
Crime Movie?

Jef Costello’s apartment contains a bed, a bird, and almost nothing else. The walls are bare. The furniture is minimal. When he dresses for work—laying out his trench coat, adjusting his fedora in the mirror with gestures so precise they approach ritual—the room offers no distraction from the ceremony. This is a man who has reduced existence to essentials: the job, the clothes, the painstaking maintenance of an identity that might not exist beneath its surface.

Jean-Pierre Melville opens Le Samouraï with a fake epigraph, attributed to the Bushido Book of the Samurai: “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle… Perhaps…” The quote is Melville’s invention, the “perhaps” a tell that he’s constructing mythology rather than citing it. But the construction is the point. Le Samouraï isn’t about a real assassin; it’s about the idea of an assassin, the archetype distilled to its coldest essence.

Alain Delon plays Costello with a blankness that would be emptiness in a lesser performer. His face registers almost nothing; his body language communicates through absence. When he walks through the Paris streets—Melville shot largely at night, in rain, in the blue-gray tones that would define his late-period aesthetic—he seems to pass through the world without touching it. The women in his life (his girlfriend, the nightclub pianist who becomes witness and enigma) can’t reach him. The police who pursue him can’t catch him. His own employers, when they inevitably betray him, seem to be attacking an abstraction.

The plot mechanics are almost irrelevant: Costello takes a job, is seen by a witness who inexplicably doesn’t identify him, falls under police surveillance, becomes a liability to his employers, and moves toward a conclusion that feels predetermined from the opening frames. Melville was explicit about his debt to American noir, to the doomed protagonists of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killers, but Le Samouraï strips those influences of their American garrulousness. Nobody explains anything. The film’s first ten minutes contain almost no dialogue; when Costello finally speaks, his voice is as flat as his gaze.

The famous police lineup sequence demonstrates Melville’s method. Costello stands among other men while witnesses examine them from behind glass. The scene runs for minutes, building tension through stillness rather than action. We know the pianist saw him. She knows it. The police superintendent (François Périer, bringing weary intelligence to the procedural antagonist role) suspects it. But she doesn’t identify him, and the film refuses to explain why until much later—and even then, the explanation raises as many questions as it answers.

Melville’s mise-en-scène operates through subtraction. The colors are muted: gray suits, gray streets, gray light through gray windows. The camera movements are minimal, often holding on Costello’s face while he waits or watches. The soundtrack by François de Roubaix is spare, jazzy, willing to let silence do the work. Everything that could be removed has been removed, leaving only what’s essential to the ritual.

The influence is everywhere, usually unacknowledged. John Woo’s Hong Kong hitman films—The Killer, Hard Boiled—are explicit homages, their protagonists wearing Costello’s trench coat and carrying his solitude. Michael Mann’s Heat, with its professional criminals following codes of conduct that supersede survival, speaks Melville’s language. Drive’s nameless driver, Ghost Dog’s samurai assassin, the entire aesthetic of cool-as-emptiness that dominates action cinema—all of it flows from this ninety-minute exercise in reduction.

Delon was thirty-two, already a star, already beautiful in a way that seemed designed by committee. Melville used that beauty as a mask, something Costello wears the way he wears his hat. When the mask finally slips—in the film’s last moments, as Costello moves toward a conclusion he’s chosen—the glimpse of something human beneath is almost unbearable. We’ve spent ninety minutes watching a man pretend to be a function, and now, too late, we see the person who’s been hiding.

The ending is inevitable and perfect. Of course it ends this way. Of course the samurai chooses his death. Melville understood that the archetype demanded completion, that any other ending would betray the mythology he’d constructed. Costello adjusts his hat one final time, walks toward his fate with the same measured steps he’s used throughout, and Le Samouraï ends the only way it could: in silence, in blue light, in the solitude the fake epigraph promised.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Criterion Collection Blu-ray presents the film with a 4K restoration that honors Henri Decaë’s cinematography—the gray-blue palette finally rendered with the subtlety Melville intended.
• Melville’s follow-up Le Cercle Rouge extends the aesthetic into heist territory, with Delon returning alongside Yves Montand and Gian Maria Volonté.
• The François de Roubaix soundtrack—spare, jazzy, hauntingly effective—deserves isolated listening.