Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

By Fernando F. Croce

Senior Staff Writer

After the abuses of Luc Besson, Guy Ritchie, "Memento" and the "Ocean's Eleven" remake, is movie "cool" still even a good thing? The term, mauled by indifferent overuse, has become redolent with decadent, adolescent hollowness -- leaden where it once was feathery, it has gone in a flash from piquant seasoning to lugubrious main dish.

Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Cercle Rouge," a terrific 1970 French thriller now being re-released locally in a restored director's cut (presented by Melville fan John Woo), goes a long way in redeeming "coolness." The film arrives at a time when the term needs to purge off its hipster connotations, and viewers need to be reminded of how it can be raised into its own unique aesthetic.

After a solemn-sounding, fake-Buddhist opening quote about the metaphysical "red circle" of the title, the movie takes off on two paralleling strands of action. Corey (Alain Delon) is released from jail and immediately joins in a plan to rob a Place Vendome jewelry store; meanwhile, Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte), another convict, manages to jump out the window of the moving train from which he is being ferried.

The lines cross when Vogel, with the police hot on his heels, finds refuge inside the trunk of Corey's automobile. Within moments of their first meeting they have shared cigarettes and swapped pistols, and are planning the jewelry heist together. All they need is a seasoned sharpshooter to disarm the alarm system with a well-placed bullet.

That's where the third musketeer comes in. Jansen (Yves Montand), first seen shaking from the DTs and imagining a horde of reptiles invading his bedroom, joins in the operation less for the loot than for an opportunity to regain self-respect -- unaware that the indefatigable inspector on their trail, Mattei (Andre Bourvil), is an old chum from police academy.

Melville (1917-1973), as legend has it, replaced his own Parisian-Jewish birth name with his favorite American writer's, after reading "Moby Dick." Having fought in the military and along the Resistance during WWII, he became a dedicated cinephile (American crime dramas were especially close to his heart) and, during the 1950s, kind of a big brother to the New Wave movement of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, et al.

Revered by other filmmakers for his brand of tough-guy mythology, Melville's work is waist-deep in the worn stock types and situations that populated the Hollywood thrillers he loved so much, yet his best films go beyond parodical pastiche. Because he clearly and uncondescendingly respected them, he was able to infuse cliches with enough integrity and intensity to point toward meaty themes lurking beneath the pictures' steely sheen: namely, spirituality, honor, and redemption.

An American director working with the same raw material, even back in the good old Don Siegel-Andre De Toth-Phil Karlson days, would have zipped through it, made it punchy, straightforward. By contrast, Melville is in no rush: the film's steady, languid pace is able to accommodate two scenes of Mattei calmly feeding his cats at home, with no shoehorning strain visible.

Yet it is these kinds of scenes that offer a key to Melville's taciturn morality. The world he creates and celebrates in his movies, full of grays and metallic blues, autumnal woods and glass surfaces (splendidly captured by cinematographer Henri Decai), is marked by the weighty air of Doom -- the possibility of betrayal, the ultimate sin in the Melvillian universe, lurks behind every relationship. ("All men are guilty. They're born innocent, but it doesn't last," intones a wizened police chief.)

In a place where the wrong word or glance can lead to one's downfall, emotions need to be kept in check -- hence the inscrutable poker face of Melville's protagonists. Crooks and cops alike know that having ice water in their veins, always keeping everything close to their vests, is necessary to stay alive. In that sense, Alain Delon, with his hardened Riviera beauty, is the perfect Melville actor: when he dons a mask for the big, elaborate heist, it seems like a redundant act.

Shorn of emotional outlets, the characters' actions turn unexpectedly eloquent, as the opening of a safe and the tying of a trench coat become windows into what they keep bottled up inside. Delon disarming a couple of thugs in a billiard joint reveals catlike pulse and terrific grace, while Montand's snazzily attired examination of the jewelry store's surveillance equipment suggests craggy suavity and spiritual renewal.

Not quite the epitome of Melville's filmography (that would be "Le Samourai," made three years before), "Le Cercle Rouge" is nevertheless a minor classic of genre cinema. After all the static and noise from recent thrillers, it is a pleasure to watch an action movie where the action is more than an excuse to punch holes in people's torsos.