The action pictures of the French director Jean-Pierre Melville are marked by his love of genre as an æsthetic. They’re "pure" — almost devoid of the flourishes and eccentricities that the French New Wave filmmakers added in their treatments of gangster pictures and film noirs. That’s the difference between Melville’s 1955 Bob le flambeur and Godard’s 1959 Au bout de souffle/Breathless, though you can see Melville’s influence on Godard in a number of ways (his sensuous, soft-toned Parisian backdrops, for example). So Le cercle rouge, which came out in 1970 (it was Melville’s penultimate movie), a decade after Au bout de souffle and Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player, feels a little odd — adrift in time. A 140-minute policier with little humor and not much attention paid to character, it’s a special kind of exercise in style and dramatic concentration.

And Melville pulls it off. He creates tension from the details of the staging, the hushed focus, and the rapt beauty of the images, which are lit by the legendary cinematographer Henri Decaë (whose work gleams in the spanking new print being screened at the Brattle). The story revolves around a jewelry-store heist perpetrated by three men brought together by chance and bonded by mutual respect. Corey (the improbably handsome Alain Delon) has just been released from prison; he means to go straight, but the guard (Pierre Collet) who suggests he knock over the shop (which the man knows about through a brother-in-law employed there) reminds him how slim his chances are of landing legitimate employment given that his only expertise is criminal. So Corey lifts a few thousand francs from his old boss Rico (André Ekyan) — money he figures he’s owed for keeping quiet in jail — to bankroll his new project and sets out for Paris.

One of his partners is Jansen (Yves Montand), a safecracker whom Corey unknowingly rescues from the depths of alcoholism. When we first see Jansen, he’s crippled by a nightmarish case of the DTs. I doubt that the debonair Montand ever got to play a scene like this one in any other movie, and he’s terrific in it. The other partner is Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), who has just escaped from the police inspector (André Bourvil) who was escorting him to prison for murder. Eluding the net that Captain Mattei and his associates have hung around the countryside to trap him, Vogel hides in the trunk of a parked car that turns out to be Corey’s. Corey is of course sympathetic to his circumstances, and Vogel helps him to get loose of the thugs Rico has sent after him — for his money and for revenge. And that’s pretty much all there is to the narrative, except for a subplot involving a club owner (the distinguished character actor François Périer) with ties to the underworld whom Mattei shakes down. The rest is the caper itself, which is shot so elegantly — and, like the theft sequence in Rififi, in virtual silence — that you hold your breath until it’s over.

Melville was very canny. He knew he could get away with a somber, stripped-down version of a heist movie, even with a running time that might seem attenuated in most action films (a couple of summer blockbusters come in at the same length as Le cercle rouge but feel interminable), as long as he could keep his audience intimately engaged in the process of the action. And he was smart enough to cast charismatic performers like Delon, Volonté, and Montand, who fill in the gaps created by the director’s relative lack of interest in character. Delon was never a great actor, but as a camera subject he’s mesmerizing, and there’s a woeful quality to his presence, a regretful worldliness. Volonté is earthier, and he is a great actor, though his work is hardly known at all in this country. (He’s mostly associated with Italian directors like Elio Petri — the Harvard Film Archive showed a number of their collaborations over the past month — and Francesco Rosi.) The combination of these three men is reason enough to see Le cercle rouge.