The Cinematheque

“The closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.”

John Woo

Existential, austere, and eternally cool, Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir masterpiece Le samouraï is, for many, the defining Melville film. Alain Delon is Jef Costello, a laconic, fedora-capped contract killer who abides by the code of the bushido. After a meticulously plotted hit on a club owner leaves behind eyewitnesses, Jef is pegged as the perp by a tenacious cop, but walks thanks to an ironclad alibi. The assassin’s anonymous employer, meanwhile, determines he’s too great a liability to live. Delon, already an arthouse staple (and heartthrob) for roles in classics by René Clément, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni, cemented his celebrity with this iconic performance. The affectless anti-heroes of films by John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, Nicolas Winding Refn, and David Fincher, among others, owe Le samouraï an enormous debt.

In French with English subtitles

“Delon became here that rare thing: a movie totem, not an actor or character but a temple god in our communal consciousness.”

Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

“[Melville] helped develop modern film noir … The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense … Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen than to sit through a film where things we don’t care about are happening constantly.”

Roger Ebert