Cool cinema

Melville's Le samourai returns

There's no cooler film playing about Boston this week than Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 Le samourai, which is getting revived May 2 through 8 at the Brattle. No current movie dares such a frigid protagonist as Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a pretty-faced hit man with a heart of cold. He guns down people because "I'm paid to do it." That's his total explanation, and he's equally impassive when shooting or getting shot, or having a revolver pointed at his dreamboat mug.

So what kind of hero do we have? One not of substance (he's an amoral schizophrenic) but of style.

Delon's Jef is a bedazzling one-man dance of gangster iconography, whether, Bogie-fashion, he's pushing his hands into his raincoat pockets or deftly igniting a cigarette, or sneaking on white gloves for a potential kill. His most dapper move he saves for his hat, circling the rim each time with a finger and a thumb.

Is almost-silent Jef an inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction's gesture-obsessed killers, minus their Hemingway talk?

As he's explained in many interviews, Quentin Tarantino worships the gangster "noirs" (Bob le flambeur, Le doulous, etc.) of Melville (1917-1973), a godfather of the French New Wave. Tarantino's seminal belief that "violence is an aesthetic subject" is affirmed throughout Melville's assassin- and assassination-soaked oeuvre. In Le samourai, the fetishized gangland posing, artful and colorful, provides reason enough to champion the film.

Even better are Melville's homicidal payoffs. The precarious quiet is punctured four times by dizzy gun battles. These last in total about 10 seconds, yet what exhilaratingly choreographed eradication!

Le samourai also shows that Melville was as dedicated a movie freak as Tarantino. Jef's terrain, though subterranean Paris, seems intended by Melville as a disjointed, Europeanized homage to the Hollywood hardboiled world. The mean streets Jef walks are the familiar shadowy ones of Chandler adaptations, his austere apartment (a hot plate, three pots, a caged bird) a spot where a Hammett film operative could bed down.

And Melville is surely thinking John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Fritz Lang's M when, paralleling the clandestine gangster activities, he details the behind-the-scenes of the law at work. Among his Lang- and Huston-influenced sequences are several pulsating semi-documentary scenes of Jef thrust into a police line-up, and exciting episodes of undercover gendarmes tailing Jef through the Paris métro.

There's also a fabulous chess game/chamber play in which police break into Jef's apartment and professionally bug it (a three-minute sequence?), whereupon Jef comes home and, impassive as ever, debugs it (another two minutes?). The only sound through all this: Jef's loyal bullfinch, nervously squeaking in its cage. Splendid!

IN THE EARLY '60s, a very rich and very eccentric American, Conrad Rooks, spent great sums of his money to make an independent autobiographical movie about his years with alcohol and drugs (heroin, cocaine, peyote) and how he kicked them. The film, Chappaqua (named for Rooks's utopian childhood town), was filmed over four years in many countries, with various hip people (Allen Ginsberg, Ornette Coleman, Moondog) dropping in for a bit of the shooting. Ravi Shankar contributed a nifty score, and Robert Frank did the cinematography with a kind of ghostly super-realism that recalls his The Americans photographs.

Rooks wrote, directed, and took on the Rooks-like leading role as Russel Harwick. In quite a coup, he got Jean-Louis Barrault (the mime in Les enfants de Paradis) to agree to a rare movie part as a sympathetic psychiatrist. And Rooks persuaded his pal William S. Burroughs to come aboard as scary Opium Jones, the vampiric spirit of addiction who tries to steal Harwick's soul.

Chappaqua was completed in 1966 and won a prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The movie opened in the States in 1967, 30 years ago. And disappeared. Rooks hid out abroad. Nobody has seen his film since. Now it's been re-released; it'll be at the Harvard Film Archive May 2 though 6.

Well, let's give Chappaqua credit as a genuine oddity and concede that Rooks is an original spirit. He's fine at the jaunty center of his movie, marching about in a cowboy hat exactly like that worn years later by Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders's 1977 The American Friend. Surely, Hopper and Wenders must have seen the film? In fact, Hopper must have studied Chappaqua before making 1969's Easy Rider. Chappaqua is rife with the kind of psychedelic landscapes for which Easy Rider became a million times more famous.

Sadly, there comes a point in viewing where Chappaqua's novelty and historical interest aren't enough. Halfway through, it tumbles the way of most head-movie experiments: the images become stagnant and repetitive, and the story wilts. "Too trippy" was the judgment of a grown-bored Gen X person who watched Rooks's film with me. The twentysomething was right.