Crime--One of the Enduring French Arts

The American Cinematheque’s outstanding series “Jean-Pierre Melville and the French Crime Film” concludes this week at Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave., starting Friday at 7:15 p.m. with a new, uncut 35-millimeter print of Francois Truffaut’s 1969 “Mississippi Mermaid,” which in dazzling fashion utilizes the venerable devices of the murder mystery for a romantic salute to grand passion. As with his earlier “The Bride Wore Black,” he draws upon a vintage William Irish (Cornell Woolrich) novel.

Mississippi is the name of the steamer that brings Catherine Deneuve to the French colonial island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean to become the mail-order bride of tobacco planter Jean-Paul Belmondo. It looks as though we’re in for all idyll and no story, but Truffaut is laying a firm foundation before building to a devastating payoff.

“Mississippi Mermaid” becomes an homage to Jean Renoir through its depictions of the beauties of nature and its nostalgia for romantic love and compassion for its lovers. The film is also an homage to Woolrich himself, a writer who through the power of his style transmuted the almost amusingly rigid schemata of his plots into expressions of passion at its most obsessive.

With the 1967 “Le Samourai” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.), Melville draws upon the heroes of Japanese swordplay dramas for inspiration for the character of his hero (Alain Delon), a consummately cool and self-sufficient hired killer who lives by his own code with an awesome fearlessness. Hired to shoot a shadowy underworld kingpin (whose front, typically for Melville, is a sleek Parisian nightclub), Delon works out an alibi and submits confidently to police questioning--only to narrowly escape being shot to death himself at a rendezvous to collect his fee. As he embarks upon a course of revenge, the police, who suspect that alibi, simultaneously begin their elaborate surveillance of him.

Melville’s placing of so impassive, so resolute a figure in what is actually a conventional crime melodrama plot results in a kind of existentialist gangster film in which Delon’s fate takes on the relentless inevitability of tragedy. “Le Samourai” is a film of few words but many vivid images and, above all, impeccable style.

It will be followed by Melville’s elegant final film, “Un Flic” (1972), in which Deneuve is caught between two men, Delon and Richard Crenna.

Adapted from Jim Thompson’s Serie Noire thriller “Pop. 1280,” Bertrand Tavernier’s “Coup de Torchon” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.) is that rarity, an entirely original, thoroughly unpredictable film that makes you think as well as laugh and feel. The sleepy, seedy town of Bourkassa in 1938 French West Africa with its deceptively bright sunlight and pastel hues is deep in that Graham Greene territory in which Europeans rot spiritually as well as physically in remote, exotic climes. Bourkassa’s ineffectual chief of police (Philippe Noiret) would seem to be a prime example of such corruption.

At home, which is a spacious but dingy flat overlooking a ramshackle outhouse, he allows his flashy, bored wife (Stephane Audran) to carry on flagrantly with her so-called brother (Eddy Mitchell). An object of constant ridicule and humiliation, Noiret is perceived as slow-witted, naive and cowardly. That’s exactly the way Noiret wants it, for at last he does turn the tables, shockingly. Yet, as droll as it is, “Coup de Torchon” is far from the classic Alastair Sim revenge comedy “The Green Man,” but rather evolves into a philosophical discourse, indicting humanity’s terrible indifference, but with no loss of pace or humor.

Following at 9:30 p.m. is an Alain Corneau double feature, “Serie Noire” (1979) and “Police Python .357” (1975). The title of the first film refers to that reputable French crime fiction series and is also based on a Jim Thompson novel. “Serie Noire” is not a thriller but a darkly comical, exhilarating portrait of a feckless, reckless door-to-door salesman (Patrick Dewaere) who gets caught up in messy, awkward serial killings. Dewaere’s Frank Poupart is a handsome, volatile guy with big dreams whose life starts unraveling the instant he knocks on the door of a decrepit 19th century house in a murky, muddy Paris suburb. Answering it is a shrewd, evil old lady who’s not interested in whatever gadgetry of the moment he has to sell but asks him to line her up with a mohair bathrobe. She sends him reeling in shock when he learns she expects to pay for it by prostituting her underage niece (Marie Trintignant). Yet the sight of this exquisite, near mute girl, who instantly presents herself to him in the nude, transfixes him; in an instant he determines to rescue her and, of course, he in time falls in love with her.

The mobility of Pierre William Glenn’s camera and the rich, muted glow of his images capture a low life of tacky settings and quirky, marginal people that make “Serie Noire’s” sleazy atmosphere powerfully pungent, and the film is charged with the high-wire act that is Dewaere’s portrayal of the hyper, not-so-swift Frank, a man of seedy charm whose mercurial nature becomes progressively dangerous. Dewaere manages to make Frank seem at once lethal and vulnerable; this is one of the finest performances by the greatly gifted actor who, overcome by drug addiction, committed suicide in 1982 at age 35.

“Police Python .357” celebrates the enduring presence of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret in an absorbing and satisfying policier. In this instance, Montand is a veteran police inspector doggedly striving to find out who brutally murdered a beautiful young woman (Stefania Sandrelli) with whom he had become infatuated. At the same time, he’s trying to avoid being accused of the crime himself.

“Police Python .357” is firmly in the Alfred Hitchcock tradition of suspense that clues in the audience while keeping the characters in the dark. What emerges in this solidly crafted--if a bit lengthy--genre piece is the plight of essentially decent middle-aged people who are plunged into moral chaos as a result of one fatal misstep. “Police Python .357” is reassuring in its familiarity and unstinting professionalism. (213) 466-FILM.