Tag Archives: Le Cercle rouge

BORSALINO (JAQUES DERAY, 1970)

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Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Saw Borsalino last night, as good an example of a star vehicle as you’ll find. Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo are gangsters in 1930s Marseilles; Belmondo has taken over Delon’s girl while he serves time. When he gets out, they get into a fight over her, find they’re equally matched, team up and take-over the Marseilles mafia. Delon is feline, mysterious, aspiring to elegant living but not afraid to get dirty. Belmondo is good natured, happy with the simpler things, and likes to show off, either through his too-loud clothes or through his body, which is in much better shape than Delon’s. It’s a charming film, a good-natured pastiche of gangster films, all about fulfilling or playing with the audience’s expectations of what these particular stars do and the particular ways they glitter and shine. There are scenes of them in new suits, strutting up or down staircases, where you just know it’s designed to make the audience sigh or purr or go ‘WOW!’ That’s really what the whole film is for, a play on star personas to make them exponentially powerful together, rather like Brangelina at a later time. An enormous hit, a clear influence on THE STING in tone look, and even music. Perssonally I prefer watching the Delon/Belmondo to the Newman/Redford. A fun watch.

 

A great year for Delon as LE CERCLE ROUGE also made the list of top ten box office hits.

José Arroyo

Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, 1942)

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Next to LE CERCLE ROUGE (Melville, 1970), MR. KLEIN is Delon’s greatest film of the 70s, the Canal + restoration so gorgeous that I’m still frustrated I couldn’t rip it to share some images with you. I suspect my external blu-ray drive doesn’t accept 4k and would welcome recommendations for a new one.
Robert Klein (Delon)is an antiques dealer profiting from the difficulties facing in Paris, 1942. We encounter him buying a Dutch master from someone who needs gold to escape in a hurry. He’s ever so apologetic, ‘I’m embarrassed to be buying at these prices’. ‘Then why do you?’ answers the man whom circumstances force to accept the deal. As he’s escorting the client out, the postman delivers a copy of ‘Informations Juives’, the Jewish community newspaper, addressed to him. Cognisant of the dangers this presents, he goes to the police to claim, as in so many Hitchcock narratives, that he’s the wrong man; and this sets a chain of events where as he begins searching for the other, Jewish, Robert Klein, and as the system increasingly begins to treat him as a Jew, he begins to question his own identity, increasingly admires the other Robert Klein, who seems to be loving, resisting, fighting back. By the end he becomes ‘The Other,’ but at great cost, as the film ends with the infamous Vel d’Hiv round up of Parisian Jews, where the French government itself delivered 13, 152 jews to the Germans, who promptly put them on trains to extermination camps. The extent of the French authorities’ collaboration was only beginning to come to light as MR. KLEIN was being released and might account for it not being a hit. It’s an extraordinary film. It took me most of yesterday to see because it’s a film about dread that evokes and makes you feel it, that dread increases and doesn’t let up until the final frame, so I used the pause button a lot, and I wish I hadn’t, a weakness, as one destroys all the filmmakers’ rhythms. I wish I’d seen it on a big screen.
There are many extraordinary scenes in this astonishing film. Reviewers often mention the opening, where a phrenologist measures and pokes a middle-aged woman to deduce whether she will be awarded the ‘not Jewish’ certificate on which her safety depends. I’ll merely highlight another,  a metonym for the film as a whole, a musical number based on the anti-semitic Jud Süs, where performers denigrate jews for the benefit of an audience including Nazi officials, but in which some of the performers are clearly men in drag, no doubt soon to follow the jews into the cattle cars provided by the Nazis. it’s a film full of such portentous moments.
Delon was one of the producers of this film and made it possible. I love the billing on the poster ‘Delon, Losey, Mr. Klein’ highlighting auteurism but putting the star system above all.
José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 224 – Le Cercle rouge

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Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

We conclude our dalliance with Jean-Pierre Melville with 1970’s Le Cercle rouge, a heist film with an impressive cast of Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. We discuss how genre conventions operate in the film – the shortcuts an understanding of genre provides allow details to make the difference, Mike suggesting that it all comes out through character relationships and quirks.

In discussing Le Cercle rouge, we think back on what we’ve learned about Melville’s style, themes and interests. For Melville, emotional attachment is dangerous and makes one vulnerable; it’s a rather bleak outlook, but José argues that his films aren’t without their romantic aspects. Mike remarks upon the way in which Melville’s style has been interpreted and appropriated by the filmmakers he influenced, noting that the vivacity with which, for instance, Quentin Tarantino effuses about Melville is not reflective of Melville’s films themselves, which are slower and more pensive than you might be led to expect. To José, it’s existentialist cinema through and through, and, naturally, he loves it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.