Jean-Pierre Melville

A highly-influential French filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Melville's innovative visual style and frugal mode of production highly influenced the movement of the French New Wave, even as its adherents dismissed his later work. Denied entrance into the heavily unionized French film industry, Melville took matters into his own hands and formed his own production company in 1946. From the beginning, such films as "Silence of the Sea" (1949) and "The Terrible Children" (1950) impressed fellow filmmakers with their lyrical quality and unadorned technique. Crime dramas like "Bob the Gambler" (1956) and "The Finger Man" (1962) made explicit Melville's fascination with American noir, although his increasingly polished films soon lost him support within France's critical circles. After working with New Wave leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo on several projects, Melville found his definitive "beautiful destructive angel" with Alain Delon, who starred in the director's existential masterpiece, "The Samurai" (1967), as well as "The Red Circle" (1970) and "Dirty Money" (1972) prior to the writer-director's death in 1973. Under-documented as a leading mid-century director for decades, in the mid-1990s Melville was thankfully reappraised by the critical establishment in France, as well as international filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, John Woo and Jim Jarmusch, who helped introduce his body of work to a new generation.