Honor Among Thieves: The Cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville

by Andrew Dickos

The crosscurrents between the classic Hollywood cinema and France's postwar cinema are rich in producing iconic imagery with philosophical resonance, and no filmmaker has immersed himself in this project more than Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973). Nurtured on American movies, and living through the turbulent years of the mid-20th century, Melville memorialized his wartime experiences in the Resistance with works like Le Silence de la mer and L'Armée des ombres while alternately presenting the stark glamor of his postwar film noir heroes in films like Bob le flambeur and Le Samouraï. A filmmaker who redefined the rules of postwar independent filmmaking and influenced a generation of New Wave acolytes, Melville was also able to captivate the popular audience with stories of beleaguered existential outsiders-gangsters, thieves, and rogue cops-as they wend their way toward a greater definition of our modern human condition. Honor Among Thieves profiles this filmmaker's eventful life and discusses his cinema as an essential body of work in our reckoning of postwar European cinema, and of Melville's own influence on the filmmakers who admire him.

244 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2021

Reviews

[Stacey Schmitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fans of Melville will seek this book out. Fans of Melville will also already know all of the information therein. Essentially a glossary. I’m glad it exists, but it’s not much.

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best approached as something of an introduction to Melville, making it rather unnecessary by the same measure. The sources it endlessly quotes from are likely better matches for those with prior knowledge and/or serious interest.

While acknowledging the significant roles of women in Melville’s non-noir films and their limited existence in the later noirs themselves, the author downplays the homosexuality the director alludes to in Le Cercle Rouge, and doesn’t read enough into the significance of a trans character even appearing at all in Un Flic. These are important elements to consider in a run of films that deal exclusively in the codes, honour, and morality of capital M “men” (even if the films are otherwise decidedly stripped of any true sexual tension). These two final films, Un Flic especially (which the book’s author deems a lesser film in the director’s canon), see Melville quietly subverting, or at least playing with, elements of the traditional noir (read: his noir), and leave one wondering what, if anything, he might have played with next.

To say Melville challenged tropes may be a bit of a stretch, as his noirs all but rely on them and he was always purposely unpolitical outside of his war films (even then they are films of survival more than anything, to paraphrase the book at hand). However, the aformentioned subtleties show a certain progression: A director, for years so utterly entrenched in a world where characters’ entire existences rely on a certain set of codes, was beginning to come through the other side of that immersion and start tweaking the fabric surrounding those very same codes.

Also, find me another book that says “chiaroscuro” more times than this one.

[Julien L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as in-depth an analysis of Melville's films as I would've liked, but it's a good primer into his work and the general themes of his films, as well as the historical and social milieus in which these films operate. Needless to say, I think what hinders Dickos from going deeper is the attempt to mix multiple critical modes of reading his films all at once, and within a limited page count (approx. 152 pages to be precise). Still, worth checking out if you want to understand Melville's films and get into one of the top ten film makers ever.