Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

First let me say I'm a fan of Melville. His compositions of a frame, his use of silence, his held shots, but THE RED CIRCLE is not one of Melville's better films.

Melville was always a minimalist, he was never a director who had much to say, 60% of his films were always... silence. So a 100 minute movie for Melville, was really only 40 mins of movie with 60 mins of style. His best movies, Le Doulous and Le Samourai, stay right around this 100 minute mark, coming in at 108 and 105 minutes respectfully. And at that length, they take Melville's minimalism and style as far as it can go, without slumping into tedium or filler.

At a 140 minutes Red Circle, falls headlong into tedium and filler. It is Melville's emptiest movie, with his customary 40 mins of story now horrifically stretched into two hours and 20 minutes. There's a lot to like in pieces about this movie; the train break, the trunk scene, but they are few and far between.

Two nearly identical long scenes of the inspector feeding his cats, the laughably ineffective hallucination scene, and the robbery itself, unlike his earlier works... are flawed uses of silences. Melville, perhaps believing his own hype, takes it too far, they are tedious, tedious scenes.

He tries to outdo Asphalt Jungle and Rififi and he fails miserably. And even edited down substantially the movie would still fail, because the 40mins of story that Le Doulos and Samourai had... were brilliant, RED CIRCLE is not. While Melville did the script for all three of these films, the first two were sourced from acclaimed novels of the time.

Here in RED CIRCLE Melville goes it alone, making up his own story, and it shows, in a confused and muddled film that ends as poorly and as unconvincingly as any film in recent memory.

All in all, not Melville's finest hour. So have to side here with Bluesdoctor, Bornjaded, Mike, and Steve and give this one a fail.

** out of ****.

Fmovies: Commissaire Mattei(André Bourvil) is a single with a little gun who loves cats and his boss at the Paris police department is a philosopher who knows that even the police becomes sooner or later guilty. That is what the film is all about. And a jewel robbery at the place Vendome.

Corey (Delon) brings the plan from prison, Vogel(Volonté)joins him and helps him against two tough guys, who are after him, because he took mafioso Ricos(Andre Eycan) money, while Rico already took Coreys girl friend and left him very much alone for five years in jail. Corey and Vogel find a third man, Jansen(Montand), a former police officer and sniper who opens a security lock by shooting special hand made ammunition into a hole. A perfect plan and cooperation, but they have to sell the booty and there is Mattei in the role of a buyer in disguise. The circle closes. Running to help each other they are shot by the cat loving Mattei and his little pistol.

It took Melville 20 years he says to make a robbery film after he failed to get a contract for RIFFIFI. Melville wrote the screenplay and filmed in the south of France and in Paris of yesteryear. The great Henri Decae is as usual the lighting cameraman. It is the one before last picture of Melvilles who died after another film with Delon in 1972.

Melville actually wanted Belmondo instead of Volonté, he didn't like that Italian at all, but Volonté-Vogel is an excellent fugitive and gives next to Bourvil the most convincing performance. But mind you: Melville notes, that Volonté is an instinctive actor, a strange character, very wearying and absolutely impossible on a French set. Melville didn't like him at all and didn't want to work with him ever again.

Melville is wrong. Volonté give the most lively character in the nowhere of not so many interesting characters. You can see what he is feeling being chased by Mattei and his little dangerous gun and all the dogs of France in winter 70. A wild actor.

Also André Bourvil, who passed away close to the time of the filming. He also was not first choice, but definitely a great substitute. He carries the instinct of a lonely hunter through the whole film and gets in the end his chance to become guilty once more.

Jansen has entered at night the jewelry shop with a rifle and a tripod but risks eventually freehandedly a successful shot. When he meets Delon the first time we already know that the elegant Jansen has a severe drinking problem. After the robbery Montand renounces to take his part of the booty and mentions to Delon, who looks up to him, that he only got into the red circle, because he wanted to take revenge on the inhabitants of his wardrobe. Delon doesn't catch what he means. The audience recalls having seen Montand in a great scene in his haunted house fighting helplessly nightmare creatures that come out of the wardrobe and attack him. At that time a very rare scene, one recalls a long time after. I bet it was ever so difficult to arrange and direct that stuff at a time no one imagined the coming days of digital movie making. Great artwork when art was made by hand.

We sure will remember a crew like the actors, still it seems even after 33 years this one stays the less popular of the six thrillers of Melville. What is wrong with it? I am afraid one doesn't take much interest in those three actors (showing three criminals) and their police hunter. We learn too little about Corey and his fatal 5 years away from his beautiful girl(Anna Douking). Montand is still a great

Viewed at the Golden Apricot Film Festival, Yerevan, 2017. The peak film of the Yerevan week was without a doubt "Le Cercle Rouge", the 1970 all star gangland thriller by master of the genre, Jean-Pierre Melville. Not as well known as his younger Nouvelle Vague disciples, Truffaut and Godard, but a much better filmmaker, Melville specialized in deliberately paced psychological thrillers in which top French stars delivered some of their best performances. At the very beginning we are informed that the cryptic title, The Red Circle, comes from a fatalistic Buddhist capsule of wisdom which states that no matter what their divergent paths may be all men end up in the same Red Circle. The three men with the divergent paths here are (1) Corey, a cool gangster just released from prison and hoping to go straight (Alain Delon), (2j Vogel, a desperado killer on the lam, (Italian star Gian Maria Volonte) and (3) Jansen, a retired expert police marksman with a drinking problem and questionable morals (Yves Montand). They come together by fate to successfully pull off a tremendous midnight jewelry heist on Ritzy Place Vendôme in central Paris but will all end up in the fatal Red Circle due to a complex network of interlocking intrigues and betrayals. Bravado, integrity, and betrayal are recurrent themes in Melville films. Pulling them in to the fatal circle is another iconic French actor, Bourvil, as the wily cat loving detective relentlessly tracking the escaped Vogel all across France from Marseille to Paris, there callously exploiting his major informant contacts. (François Périer, another major French character actor). The long heist scene filmed in complete silence is spellbinding and a tribute of sorts to a similar scene in the Jules Dassin technically perfect crime thriller "Rififi" of 1955. Together with "Le Samouaï", another Melville masterpiece also starring Delon, Red Circle is an enduring twin peaks of French thriller cinema. Breathless entertainment all the way, and the work of a master craftsman at the top of his game. Cercle Rouge was part of a five film tribute to Maître Melville in the Armenian capital on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Le Cercle Rouge fmovies. Jean-Pierre Melville is one of the most slept on directors of all time. A little too old to ride the crest of the French New Wave, Melville was respected by Godard, Truffaut and the rest but never caught the attention of the international film community like those who followed him did. Melville's crime tales are directed perfectly straight forward without the hipness that permeated the French New Wave . His protagonist of choice Alain Delon had the ability to portray either cop or crook and the audience would always side with him. "The Red Circle," is one of Melville's best collaborations with Delon--not as good as "Le Samourai" (1967) but superior to "Un Flic" (1971). Nowadays cats tend to say "they don't make movies like that anymore" but "they" weren't making films like Melville during his time--over thirty years ago. Don't sleep on Melville, he's the real deal. To put it simply, Melville was and still is the man.

"Le Circle Rouge" from 1970 is a French film. That's another way of saying that a lot of Americans won't like it and won't understand this gritty and underplayed film. The title comes from a made-up Buddhist saying, "When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle." Melville made up a saying for Le Samourai as well.

One thing we've lost in filmmaking in this country is the art of the buildup. You have to get to the point of the story in five minutes. This film is about a jewelry heist, and the jewelry heist happens very late in the film.

Corey (Alain Delon) is released from prison after five years. Just before he leaves, one of the guards tells him about a jewelry heist he can get in on. Corey is uncertain, so instead he goes to his old boss Rico and steals money from him. Rico sends thugs after him to retrieve the money.

In a parallel plot, a criminal Vogel (Gian-Maria Volonte) is being transported by train and escapes. He winds up hiding in Corey's trunk while Corey is in a restaurant.

Corey finds him, hears his story, and lets him travel by trunk. The car is cut off by Rico's people, and in the ensuing fight, Corey loses the money. Now broke, he decides to join the jewelry heist and include Vogel.

They invite a former police detective, Jansen (Yves Montand) to join them. He is a bad alcoholic having the DTs. Somehow he manages to pull himself together and meet with them. The heist is on.

I would be surprised if there is one page of dialogue in this script, and yet you keep watching. Perhaps influenced by another classic, Rififi, the heist is carried out in complete silence.

The director, Melville, does a magnificent job of keeping us interested, even if there is not much background given of the characters. We know that Delon's boss is sleeping with his former girlfriend, and that's about it. We don't know what made Montand an alcoholic. Melville keeps us focused on their objective.

The acting is very smooth, with Volonte (Vogel) a standout who also has the best role. His scene of escaping police and dogs is one of the best scenes in the movie.

The police commissioner in the movie states that in the end, all men are guilty, even the police. He believes that we are all tainted with original sin. Maybe so. "Le Circle Rouge" won't do much to convince you otherwise.

Everyone likes the coolly created, memorable heist movie. Alain Delon provides the antihero, Melville provides the cool, and a handful of other great talent (Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonte, and Andre Bourvil, mostly) arrives to add a crisp engaging movie...

...with very little dialog. This is great, because one certain aspect of the genre tends to be a lot of dialog involving the quick-witted and their various repartees. This movie, however, could be watched with the sound completely off and not too terribly much would be missed. Not to say the sound is bad, oh no, the jazzy soundtrack and the crisp audio catching the little movements makes the slow, patient deliberation of the patients very compelling.

What's also really neat about this film is that the color cinematography is pretty fantastic. Usually when it comes to cinematography, black and white movies tend to stick out in my mind, but this film has some very strong and beautiful imagery that makes the movie pure visual pleasure to observe.

--PolarisDiB