Le Cercle Rouge

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

1970 / 140min / DCP

Maybe the most Melvillian movie that Melville ever made, Le Cercle Rouge is an exhaustive catalog of the stylistic fetishes observed throughout its director’s body of work, a supremely controlled, precision engineered thriller about three taciturn tough guys—an alcoholic ex-flic (Yves Montand), an escaped prisoner-in-transit (Gian Maria Volontè), and a cooler-than-cool jazzhound ex-con (Alain Delon)—working together to empty the vaults of a Paris jewelry store and stay one step ahead of a bloodhound police commissioner played by popular comic Bourvil. An elegy for the expiring code of honor among thieves set in a misty, gunmetal gray world, and absolute catnip for the connoisseur of the policier.

Part of Euro-Heists