An elegy on the American gangster genre by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (note to the unwary: no actual sword-wielding samurai are to be found herein). The opening twenty minutes or so are as smoothly tooled as any stretch of cinema you could ever hope to see, with each shot clicking into place with incontrovertible finality. The story interest tails off after that, but the character interest (or rather, stereotype interest) holds up all the way to the monkish hitman's ritualistic self-sacrifice. The colorless photography of Henri Decae is beautifully controlled; the performance of Alain Delon is likewise. (1967) — Duncan Shepherd
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