Quentin Tarantino called Le Doulos “my favourite screenplay of all time.” (One can see in its twisty tale of treachery a template for Reservoir Dogs.) One of the essential Melvilles, the impossibly cool Le Doulos is a pure expression of the director’s style and ethos. It is also his most fulsome tribute to American cinema. (Time Magazine commented that the film made Paris “look like a back lot at Warner Brothers.”) Beautiful, violent – J. Hoberman counts eight killings, Joan Didion nine – and “attitude-drenched” (Hoberman), the film has been described by Melville as “a nocturnal western in the city.” Belmondo, still somewhat Breathless, plays Silien, a petty thief who may or may not be a “finger man” (stool pigeon); the actor didn’t know whether or not he was playing an informer until he saw the final cut of the film. Full of bravura sequences, the most famous being a take that lasts 9 minutes 38 seconds, Le Doulos offers a surfeit of style, and Belmondo at his best. “Terrific performances, and equally terrific camerawork . . . conjure a rivetingly treacherous, twilit world” (Tom Milne).