Tuesday, March 08, 2011

A Snitch in Time Saves... Nothing

Le Doulous (1962)
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I figured out about how long it takes me to forget my thoughts on a perfectly acceptable Melville crime picture: four weeks. Time travel is tricky, and if you’re lazy like I am, you don’t take as many notes as you should. The truth is, I’ve got ten reviews to write to get me back to today – that is, sometime in early April – and by the time I “publish” them, I hope to share a few laughs over Justified and the last season of Friday Night Lights, too. By then it will be the middle of the month at least, and you, like me, will recall Le Doulos as one more attempt to jumpstart a dead horse with the “quantity, not quality” banner unfurled limply behind me.

Ever onward, then. When the movie was over, I made it as far as the plot summary on the Netflix sleeve and realized that I hadn’t even noticed the scene that Le Doulos is famous for: a one-take interrogation, possibly in a police cell in Paris. But it couldn’t have been longer than the tracking shot that begins the film along a sidewalk in the dark, with the sound of footsteps as they echo (and echo) off culverts and underpasses. Belmondo was too handsome to ever play a weasel, so the protagonist’s principal suspicions ring false from the first assault on his wife. I expected a movie in color, I guess, instead of a blonde chained to the radiator. But it works for what it is, which is either a gray day or a washtub once the laundry’s gone.