Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966)

    Melville (yes, he took that name because of his admiration for the American writer) is sometimes a difficult director to like, because he appropriates so much from American films.  But he does add an impressive layer of existentialism on the surface -- usually buried deeply in American films -- that makes them uniquely French.  Le Deuxieme Souffle (Second Breath) is a heist film and a gangster film (Melville called it a film noir) that portrays the similarities between the gangsters and the police who pursue them.  The heist itself (of a truck loaded with platinum) is beautifully and elegantly done but only takes up about twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half-hour film, most of the film being devoted to the lives and planning of both the police and the gangsters and their manipulations.

  The lead role of the gangster Gu is played by Lino Ventura, who escapes from prison at the beginning of the film and joins in the heist because he needs money to leave the country. Melville directs his actors in an effectively minimalist way, with little actual dialogue, and organizes the competing factions of both the gangsters and the police in a visual scheme of crossing lines that captures the double-crossings of the characters, each of whom has something to prove.  In my most recent post, about The Man Who Cheated Himself, I mentioned that when one throws a murder weapon off a bridge one should make sure there is no boat passing underneath.  In the Melville film one learns that one should not use the same gun twice and, also, if one has escaped from prison one should stay out of sight:  the reason Gu was caught was because he ambled out to see a petanque game and was seen by a prison guard who happened to be in Paris on vacation,  a scene probably inspired by the capture of Sam Jaffe in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), one of Melville's favorite films.