When director Jean-Pierre Melville brought a copy of the script to Alain Delon, Delon asked him what the title was. When he was told the title was Le Samourai, Delon had Melville follow him to his bedroom, where there was only a leather couch and a samurai blade hanging on the wall. (From IMDB)
n an interview with Rui Nogueira Melville indicated that he had shot an alternate version of Jef’s death scene. In the alternate ending, which is actually the original version as Melville had written in the script, Costello met his death with a picture-perfect grin à la Delon. The scene was changed to its current form when Melville angrily discovered that Delon had already used a smiling death scene in another of his films. Stills of the smiling death exist. (From Wikipedia)
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I’ve seen only Bob le Flambeur by Melville, which was a lot of fun and a Nouvelle Vague film before there really was such a thing. It was remade a few years ago by Neil Jordan as The Good Thief, starring Nick Nolte. The remake was shot mostly in Nice, which was where I lived at the time it came out, so I was able to recognize a lot of the street scenes as places I walked through all the time. Soderbergh used the same trick ending in Ocean’s Eleven, which came out at just about the same time as Jordan’s movie but which used a Vegas casino and all its glitz rather than the (simulated) old-world charm of the Monaco casino.
Le Samourai is often regarded as his masterpiece – of not just tone and virtuousity, but of textures and, of course, it is morally rhizomic. I know many a noir fan that enjoy the film wildly, but even more so, a few homosexuals my age who identify with the quiet masochism and moral code of Jef too well. I’ll check out Bob Le Flambeur soon. You should see Army of Shadows, too.
I’d call this a slow-moving blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…