Following with my Pale Flower post, I also checked out another recommendation from Patton Oswalt's Criterion Closet video, the 1967 French film Le Samourai, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, starring the icon Alain Delon as a quiet hitman in Paris named Jef Costello who lives a solitary life, carries out a hit in a jazz club but is seen by several people as he leaves (including the pianist [Cathy Rosier] and the hatcheck girl [Catherine Jourdan]), and is one of many being held as a suspect by the police station. His employer (Jean-Pierre Posier) who ordered the hit is trying to figure out damage control, and the police investigator (Francois Perier) strongly suspects him but can't get the witnesses to identify him or get Costello's girlfriend (Nathalie Delon, who was married to Alain at the time as a superstar glamourous couple of 1960s Paris) to recant her backing of his false alibi that he was with her.
It's an interesting and stylish film, mixing it as a crime movie with some French New Wave hipness. I hadn't ever seen any of Alain Delon's films, and I can get how he was an icon, with these light blue/green eyes that look icy and stark, but despite his outside handsomeness, I couldn't find him attractive, he just came off as too cold and remote to me. Like there was a removed feeling to him that fit well as a hitman, but I couldn't get into him as a movie star.
I also found it funny how not only the police just round up every guy who vaguely fits the description (of mainly being young white men who look very similar), but also would parade them in front of witnesses, no one-way mirrors or barriers, with no protection for the witnesses' identities, and having the suspects switch around hats and coats for better identification. Naturally, the witnesses who saw Costello don't want to ID him right to his face, especially the pianist and hatcheck girl, likely for fear of retaliation, so it looked ridiculous that the police were doing this very public way of trying to identify suspects.
I thought this was cool to watch, and it was making me think of Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, with similar themes of a quiet hitman who lives a solitary life and follows the samurai code. Checking the Wikipedia page, I wasn't surprised that Jarmusch was influenced by it, and took some nods from the film, like Costello having a huge ring of keys so he could steal any Citreon DS car, so would Ghost Dog, having an electronic "key" to break into luxury cars. The film was also noted as an influence on John Woo's The Killer, Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive, Johnnie To's Vengeance, among others. It was a good pairing to watch after Pale Flower, watching two 1960s foreign gangster films that are very different, but both featuring hitman characters and share a moody stylish vibe to their worlds.
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