“One of the screen’s greatest masters.” – Andrew Sarris

“Jean-Pierre Melville makes the most moving films I know.” – Chris Peachment, Time Out

“Melville has always been my spiritual idol.” – John Woo

“One of those great artists who inspires as much as he entertains.” – Quentin Tarantino

In one of the more unfortunate mishaps of film history, the French New Wave became famous among North American critics and cinephiles, while the man who fathered the movement, Jean-Pierre Melville, languished in coterie obscurity. With the imprimatur of Tarantino, Woo, and Scorsese, and the recent re-release of such films as Le Doulos and the phenomenally successful Army of Shadows, this major director has finally received some of the attention here he has long deserved. A figure of inestimable importance, Melville is the French connection, the central nexus between American and French cinema, between the tradition which preceded him and the nouvelle vague. To trace his influence, as we do in this select retrospective of his films and the adjoining survey of the nouvelle vague, is to offer a crash course in postwar French cinema. (That this most French of directors was an avid Americanophile is just one of the many ironies that mark his career. When asked which directors influenced him, he rattled off the names of sixty-three American directors from the pre-war period. He wore a Stetson, drank Jack Daniel’s, loved guns, shades and big cars, knew New York better than any New Yorker, and changed his name from Grunbach to Melville in homage to his favourite American author.)

“Where you have two, one betrays;” Melville’s famous phrase not only serves as an elegant summation of his bleak world view, but in its laconicism also suggests the economy of his style. (It is no accident that the titles of films he influenced have an almost parodic terseness: The Driver, The Killer, Le Trou, Un Flic). Tough, taciturn, heavily coded and ceremonial, set in a depopulated, shadowy Paris or some ashen outpost, Melville’s thrillers tend more to the existential than the transcendental: “My ‘bad boy’ characters,” he pointed