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Jean-Pierre Melville: by Raymond Durgnat
This is an extract from an article on the Light Sleeper website. The following films are screening as part of the Festival's retrospective on Jean-Pierre Melville.
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
There can be no doubt about Melville’s importance as the precursor of the New Wave system. His Le Silence de la Mer took independence to the point of clandestinity – Vercors had refused to sell the rights to the novel, the film stock was acquired on the black-market, there was such opposition from the industry that at the Gala Premiere (in the presence of 35 Cabinet Ministers) the projection box was ringed with gendarmes to stop the film being “snatched”. Les Enfants Terribles belongs, really to a monograph on Cocteau, though directed by Melville and photographed by the chameleonic Decae. A little brittle and abrupt about its Cocteauesque romanticism, its sense of “ailleurs”, there seems an infinite depth and nastiness in its visual atmosphere, a stench of physical obscenity which becomes intenser at each viewing.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR
And here we come unmistakably to the tone and morality of the New Wave. The story of an old-time Paris crook who emerges from semi-retirement to stage a last hold-up is in the line of Rififi, Grisbi, Chnouf. But their smash-and-grab style is refined, dissolved away; the climax builds up to its suspense stealthily, rather than by assault-and-battery.
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