Jean-Pierre Melville

An American in Paris

Ginette Vincendeau

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.

1

From Film Lover to Film-maker: The Life and Career of Jean-Pierre Melville

The details of Jean-Pierre Melville’s life are sketchy and ambiguous – he deliberately cultivated mystery, and the meagre sources that exist are mostly interviews, with all the possibilities for biases, exaggeration and contradiction that such encounters contain. Since this book is a study of Melville’s films, not a biography, this may not matter. It is also the case that to a remarkable degree, Melville was someone whose life was his work. The man who hated holidays, about whom Volker Schloendorff (his assistant on Léon Morin, prêtre and Le Doulos) reflected, ‘He had an almost religious passion for the cinema. Everything related to it,’¹ this man coined the word ‘opocentric’ – ‘opo’ from opus – about himself and confirmed, ‘Nothing matters except my profession and therefore my work.’² Indeed when, on 2 August 1973, at the age of fifty-five, Melville collapsed from a heart attack in the PLM St-Jacques restaurant in Paris in the arms of writer and film-maker Philippe Labro, he was discussing difficulties with his latest script (Labro subsequently wrote a moving tribute to Melville).³

Yet film-makers are not just concepts: they are also human beings whose background, personal life and choices inflect their work. This is why, despite the reservations expressed above, I begin with a brief account of Melville’s life and career before moving on to his films. The task is not easy. The Melville archives at the Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI) in Paris contain mostly scripts – including the unpublished Un flic (unrelated to the 1972 film of the same name) – and I was able to glean a few facts in the censorship files kept at the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) as well as from meeting a wartime army colleague. Reputedly, other archives perished when his studio burnt down in 1967. The gaps in documentation leave plenty of room for speculation about all kinds of matters, from his part in the Resistance to his personal relationships. My task is not to elucidate these, but to present the information as clearly as possible insofar as it helps throw light on the films.

RÉSISTANT, CINEPHILE, ‘OPOCENTRIC’

Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach on 20 October 1917 (as already mentioned, he adopted the name Melville in honour of the American novelist). His ancestors were Eastern European Jews who had settled in Belfort, in Alsace, in the 1840s. Several generations of Grumbachs were butchers in the old part of the city. They were a close-knit, extended family: Melville’s parents were first cousins. His father, a businessman, moved to Paris where Jean-Pierre was born. He grew up in rue d’Antin in the ninth arrondissement in central Paris, in a cultured, bourgeois-Bohemian environment, and a family with socialist leanings. Although he would later move to the right, Melville declared that he was ‘a Communist from the age of 16, in 1933, until 25 August 1939. After that I stopped being a Communist. I am not religious either.’⁴ Melville’s family was sufficiently unconventional to give young Jean-Pierre a Pathé Baby camera in 1924 for his seventh birthday, and soon after a projector which delighted him even more since it enabled him to view recent releases on 9.5mm. According to Jean Wagner, starting in February 1925 he shot a number of films during his youth; by 1939 he had totalled the equivalent of thirty features in various non-theatrical formats.⁵ Melville had one sister, Janine, and an older brother Jacques, a high-ranking civil servant who was killed during the war (Jacques’ son Rémy Grumbach is a television director; the film-maker Michel Drach was also a cousin).⁶

Although Melville’s centre of gravity was Paris, he retained links with the extended family in Belfort. A formative experience was seeing his first film there, in a brasserie.⁷ Much later he called the production company formed to produce Deux hommes dans Manhattan ‘Belfort Films’. Belfort repaid the compliment. On 26 November 1987, a street in the city centre was renamed ‘Rue Jean-Pierre Melville’ by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Belfort’s mayor and then (socialist) government minister. On the day of the inauguration Chevènement joked that a grim and forlorn suburban street might have been more in keeping with the setting of Melville’s films, but that the city wanted to honour him with a major artery.

Melville went to school at the Lycée Condorcet near Gare St Lazare in central Paris, a well-regarded lycée for middle-class children. He reports not being particularly academic and being more interested in the youthful shenanigans of the ‘Gare Saint-Lazare gang’, ‘a real gang of hooligans’⁸ made up of pupils from Condorcet, a gang perhaps not unlike that seen at the beginning of Les Enfants terribles. Melville dates from this period a taste for slang and low-life characters – however, if some testimonies speak of his acquaintance with real gangsters, others have disputed his knowledge of the underworld.⁹

In any case, a bigger adventure was around the corner. Melville started his military service in the ‘Spahis’ (colonial cavalry) at the age of twenty in 1937.¹⁰ He was still a conscript when the war began. In September 1940, his regiment got caught in Belgium. He was evacuated to England via Dunkirk and repatriated to France. On his return he moved to Castres in the South, where his family had relocated, and spent the period to 1942 there, joining the Resistance networks ‘Libération’ and ‘Combat’ under the name Cartier, and later Melville.¹¹ After the Allied landing in North Africa in November 1942, ‘Cartier-Melville’ tried to reach London via Algiers. His ship was stopped and he was jailed in Spain for two months (his brother Jacques died tragically while attempting to get to Spain). At some point in 1942–3 Melville spent some time in London, where he says he worked as a sub-agent for the BCRA.¹² He reached Tunisia in autumn 1943, where he joined the First Regiment of Colonial Artillery of the Free French. At first assigned as a colonel’s chauffeur, he took part in the Italian and French liberation campaigns. On 11 March 1944 he was crossing the Garigliano below Mount Cassino. On 15 August of the same year he landed in Provence and in September he was in Lyon. His regiment was awarded the Croix de la Libération on 24 September 1945.¹³

These are the facts, as far as they can be ascertained, of Melville’s war and his involvement with the Resistance. While he unarguably belonged to the First Regiment of Colonial Artillery, as confirmed to me by one of his former co-soldiers, it has proved more difficult to trace his London activities. Dates are hazy and testimonies contradictory. This does not signify that the claims he makes are false or incorrect, since by definition records of underground movements are scanty. Two things in any case are certain. On the one hand, there is no doubting Melville’s bravery in joining the Free French, however modest his part and however much he played it down, claiming that ‘being in the Resistance if you’re a Jew is infinitely ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘An American in Paris’
• 1. From Film Lover to Film-maker: The Life and Career of Jean-Pierre Melville
• 2. Stylistic Exercises: 24 heures de la vie d’un clown, Les Enfants terribles, Quand tu liras cette lettre
• 3. Melville’s War: Le Silence de la mer, Léon Morin, prêtre, L’Armée des ombres
• 4. Between the New Wave and America: Bob le flambeur, Deux hommes dans Manhattan, L’Ainé des Ferchaux
• 5. Série Noire – films noirs: Le Doulos, Le Deuxième souffle
• 6. The Delon Trilogy: Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge, Un flic
• Conclusion: Neither American nor French, but Melvillian
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Melville’s Films at the French Box Office
• Appendix 2: Melville’s Films as Actor
• Appendix 3: Melville’s Pantheon of Sixty-four Pre-war American Directors
• Index
• eCopyright