Jean-Pierre Melville

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Pierre Melville died on the 2nd of August 1973 while eating dinner with writer Philippe Labro at the Hôtel PLM Saint-Jacques restaurant in Paris. He was 55 years old, and he had written the first 200 shots of his next film that morning. Or at least, that is how the story goes. What is certain is that the man who critics would later call a spiritual godfather of the French New Wave never got to finish Contre-enquête, the spy thriller he was preparing for actor Yves Montand. The career ended at a restaurant table, mid-sentence.

  Melville was not even born with that name. He was Jean-Pierre Grumbach, son of Alsatian Jewish parents, raised in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. The name Melville came from a war, a pseudonym adopted in the French Resistance and worn so long it eventually replaced everything that came before. Who was the man behind that borrowed name? How did a rag merchant's son from Paris become the filmmaker that John Woo would call "a god"? And why did Roger Ebert count him among "the greatest directors" when so many casual filmgoers have never heard of him? The answers stretch from a mountain crossing in the Pyrenees to the editing rooms of Paris, from the ruins of a studio fire to the jump cuts that changed cinema.

• 2. The Name He Borrowed

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  Jean-Pierre Grumbach left school at 17, working first as a courier and then as a wedding photographer. By 1937 he had joined the Communist Party, though he broke with it two years later over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That combination of political instinct and principled withdrawal would mark him for life.

  When France fell in 1940, Grumbach had already been evacuated from Dunkirk as a French Army soldier. He entered the Resistance to oppose the German occupation, and it was there that he took the pseudonym Melville, after his favorite American author, Herman Melville. His brother Jacques and his sister Janine joined the Resistance alongside him.

  In 1942, Jean-Pierre and Jacques crossed the Pyrenees separately, weeks apart, both trying to reach neutral Spain and then Britain to join the Free French Army. Jacques was carrying money intended for de Gaulle. His guide shot him dead and robbed him on the road. Jean-Pierre did not learn his brother had been killed until after the war ended. He served in the Free French Army for two years, mainly in the artillery, and fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. When the war was over, he kept the name. Grumbach was gone. Melville remained.

• 3. Building Independence

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  Returning from the war, Melville applied for a license to work as an assistant director. The application was refused. Rather than accept that barrier, he chose to direct his films by his own means, with no institutional support. He became one of the first fully-independent French filmmakers to achieve both commercial and critical success.

  He owned his own studio on the rue Jenner in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. That studio was also his home. On the 29th of June 1967, it burnt down. His personal archive of photographs and scripts was destroyed in the fire. He lost not just equipment but the physical record of his creative life up to that point.

  He was also one of the first French directors to use real locations regularly rather than studio sets, a choice that would deeply influence the generation of filmmakers who came after him. For several years he sat on the executive board of the French film classification body, the Commission de classification des oeuvres cinematographiques, part of the Centre national du cinema et de l'image animee. In 1963 he served on the jury at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival.

• 4. The Melvillian Style

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  Le Samourai arrived in 1967 and Le Cercle rouge followed in 1970. Both films showed the qualities that reviewers and later directors described as specifically and distinctly Melvillian. He drew from American gangster films of the 1930s and 1940s, shaping a visual language built on trench coats, fedora hats, and precise use of weapons as props. He also drew from Eastern philosophies and martial traditions, a combination that produced crime films with an almost ceremonial stillness.

  Melville described his own style to the filmmaker Andre S. Labarthe as "nostalgic." Critics noted its existentialist overtones. His approach to the crime film emphasized, as commentators put it, "habit and rules and codes and the consequences of breaking them." Major actors including Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Lino Ventura appeared in his films. Delon was considered, by those who worked closely with Melville, probably the definitive "Melvillian" actor.

  The style eventually became so identified with his name that when a retrospective of his films ran at Film Forum in 2017, The New Yorker's Anthony Lane wrote instructions for how to attend: "Tell nobody what you are doing. Even your loved ones... must be kept in the dark. If it comes to a choice between smoking and talking, smoke." Lane continued that the viewer should dress well but without ostentation, wear a raincoat buttoned and belted regardless of weather, and keep any revolver in the coat pocket until needed. Melville himself, in life, wore a trench coat, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a Stetson hat. He loved cats and ate candy bars.

• 5. The New Wave Connection

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  Jean-Luc Godard cast Melville in a minor acting role in Breathless, Godard's landmark New Wave film. The cameo was a gesture of homage, but Melville's contribution to that film ran deeper than a few seconds on screen. When Godard struggled with editing Breathless and could not find a way through the footage, Melville offered a direct suggestion: cut to the best parts of each shot. Godard took the advice. The jump cuts that resulted became part of what made Breathless famous.

  Melville's own approach to editing was something he valued deeply. In an interview, he said editing was his favorite part of the filmmaking process alongside writing. His influence on the New Wave was partly technical and partly a matter of example. His willingness to work outside the studio system, shooting on real streets with real locations, showed younger directors that independence was possible and that the streets of Paris themselves could serve as a set.

  His war films carried the same directness. Le Silence de la mer appeared in 1949. Army of Shadows followed in 1969, drawing on his Resistance experience. A documentary produced in 2008, Code Name Melville, running 76 minutes, focused specifically on the relationship between his Resistance years and his filmmaking approach.

• 6. A Lasting Reach

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  Michael Mann and John Woo both cited Melville as an influence. Woo named Le Cercle rouge one of his favorite films and called Melville "a god." The list of directors shaped by his work extends further: Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Walter Hill, Johnnie To, Takeshi Kitano, John Frankenheimer, John Milius, Nicolas Winding Refn, Kim Jee-woon, Hossein Amini, Jim Jarmusch, and Aki Kaurismaki.

  Melville described his politics as "right-wing anarchist" and "extreme individualist," a self-portrait that suited someone who ran his own studio, refused institutional licensing, and styled his films after a private moral code. He was friends with Jean-Luc Godard and Yves Montand, both associated with the left. The contradictions did not appear to trouble him.

  The John Wick film series, decades after his death, included deliberate nods to Le Cercle rouge. The unfinished Contre-enquête, the spy thriller he was writing when he died, was taken over by Philippe Labro, who had been dining with Melville that evening at the Hôtel PLM Saint-Jacques. Labro eventually dropped the project and made a different film instead, Le hasard et la violence in 1974, also starring Yves Montand and produced by Jacques-Eric Strauss. Melville's version, the one with 200 shots already written, was never made.