'Le Cercle Rouge' (1970) - Jean-Pierre Melville.

Not only one of iconoclast, Jean-Pierre Melville's most highly regarded thrillers, but still hugely influential for many filmmakers, the lodestone for which a great number of crime features still rely heavily upon, name any quality heist film, and you will readily see echoes of Melville's iconic work therein. From the very first scene on the train with, Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) handcuffed to taciturn, cat-loving cop, Mattei (André Bourvil) the maestro Melville creates a bleak, unflinchingly cold milieu, with very little being said, the tension is absolute, and for reasons inexplicable your allegiances reside with, Volonté, his guilt over his undisclosed crime somehow immaterial, and it is this moral ambiguity that features so strongly in 'Le Cercle Rouge'.

There's a sublime metronomic quality at work in 'Le Cercle Rouge', a cool, relentless precision to, Melville's flawless filmmaking. These Stoic characters inexorably drawn together by the merciless mechanics of crime. Those that have a predilection, or talent to do it, Corey (Alain Delon) and, Vogel's pragmatic need to elude capture, with steely-eyed enigma, Mattei's singularly pragmatic approach to stopping him never makes for anything less than uncommonly thrilling cinema!

While the immaculately tense, nerve-frying heist is meticulously executed with the filmmaker's signature flair for precision and verisimilitude, this is also where we see the curious re-birth of hopeless alcoholic, Jansen (Yves Montand) for me, Le Cercle Rouge's most innately fascinating character. When we first see him he is almost entirely insensible due to a chronic case of the DTs, and yet, the ex-police sharpshooter is now the most integral member of this gang of recidivist criminals. Once again there is a curious moral ambivalence at work, while Jansen is wholly reborn by crime, some of Mattei's actions seem positively nefarious in comparison!

The word masterpiece is oft utilized but rarely is it more meritoriously earned than in maestro, Jean-Pierre Melville's compellingly spare and sinuous crime classic 'Le Cercle Rouge'. A true marvel of razor-sharp cinematic understatement, like dead-eyed, Jensen's perfectly calibrated rifle, crime cinema in the equally steady hands of a consummate craftsman is no less lethal a proposition. The final words must come from the film itself; 'Men are guilty. They come into the world innocent, but it doesn't last!...we ALL change...for the worse!