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| Jean-Pierre
Melville |
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| Director
/ Screenwriter / Producer / Editor / Production Designer |
| 1917 - 1973 |
| Born October 20,
Paris, France |
| Key
Production Countries: France, Italy |
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Key Genres:
Post-Noir (Modern Noir), Crime, Crime Thriller, Gangster Film,
Caper, Drama |
| Key
Collaborators: Henri Decae (Cinematographer), Monique
Bonnot
(Editor), Jean-Marie Robain (Character Player), Alain Delon (Leading
Player), Theo Meurisse (Production Designer), Paul Crauchet (Character Player), Lino Ventura (Leading Player), Nicole
Stephane (Leading Player), Paul Meurisse (Leading Player), Robert
Dorfmann (Producer) |
| Highly
Recommended: Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos
(1962),
Second Breath (1966), Le
Samouraï (1967), The Red Circle (1970) |
| Recommended:
Le Silence de la mer (1947), Les Enfants terribles (1949),
Army of Shadows (1969), Dirty Money (1972) |
| Links: [
IMDB ] [ All-Movie
Guide ] [ Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[ Strictly
Film School ] [
Classic Film and Television Home Page ] [ Pop
Matters Article ] [ Guardian
Article (2003) ] [ kamera
Article ] |
| Books: [
Melville
on Melville ] [
Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: Les
Enfants terribles (1949), Bob le flambeur (1955),
Second Breath (1966), Le Samouraï (1967),
Army of Shadows (1969) |
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"Melville
was a precise, methodical director with a predilection for
themes of war and crime. The former preoccupation was
attributable to his own experiences, and the latter was the
probable result of his nostalgic admiration for the Hollywood
cinema of the 30s...Beginning in the early 60s, Melville worked
with larger budgets and with name stars like Jean-Paul Belmondo
and Alain Delon and showed an increasingly technical mastery of
the medium." - (The
MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994) |
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"He had a built-in
breathlessness, in fact, an adopted resignation to transience
and mutability that is partly an eccentric individualism and
partly what Melville inherited from American mobility and
obsolescence. It gives his gangster films a true supercharge -
"en quatrième vitesse" - and he transformed Belmondo and Delon
into beautiful destructive angels of the dark street." - David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) |
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"Powerful
endings and memorable set-pieces have a place in all Melville's
work, even the earlier films, some of which are far removed from
his later world of 'flics' and gangs', where the night-time
photography glitters as cold and metallic as a gun barrel." - David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) |
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"Betrayal, revenge, and the criminal mind are significant
elements in the work of Melville. His films are not so much
reflections of the Hollywood crime genre as indications of a
unique sensibility creating from the same source material -
crime and criminals." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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