The Cercle Rouge script is an original in the sense it was written by me and me alone, but it won't take you long to realize it's a transposed Western, with the action taking place in Paris instead of the West, in our own time rather than after the Civil War, and with cars replacing the horse.
--Jean-Pierre Melville
Melville, who changed his name to Melville in tribute to the author of Moby Dick, was intrigued by all things American. His favorite movie was John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a significant influence on Le Cercle Rouge. In Melville's film three men (Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonte) team up to rob a jeweler and it all goes bad when the fence they are using is blackmailed by both the police and the mob. The film has very little dialogue and the only woman in the cast (a former lover of Delon) is seen briefly sleeping with a mob boss. We know very little about the characters -- a man just out of prison, a man on his way to prison, a dipsomaniac former cop -- and the emphasis is on the planning of the robbery, the robbery itself and the disastrous aftermath.
Melville and his cinematographer, Henri Decae, use cool blues and green in an effectively desaturated color palette. The minimalist score, by Eric Demarson, is mostly low-key percussion and works well with Melville's stylized film, with its sudden bursts of violence and its hunted men. The film, with its hats and trenchcoats, verges on the parodic but Melville overcomes that with his passion for the drama and the interplay of the thieves, the mob and the police.
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