Le Doulos

Le Doulos is a French-Italian crime drama from 1962, directed and written by Jean-Pierre Melville. It follows Maurice Faugel, a burglar newly released from prison, who kills a man and prepares a robbery with help from an acquaintance. That acquaintance, Silien, is suspected by everyone around him of working as a police informer. When the robbery goes wrong and Maurice is arrested, he blames Silien for betraying him, though the truth about who informed and why is tangled. Melville's film sits between his early work The Silence of the Sea and Le Samouraï, made five years later, in a run of films that also includes Army of Shadows, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic.

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, with Serge Reggiani as Maurice Faugel and Jean Desailly as Superintendent Clain. The cast runs to 23 credited performers. Critics rated the film 8/10 across 27 reviews, while it holds 7.7/10 on IMDb from around 13,000 votes and 7.4/10 on TMDB from over 300 votes, a narrower gap between critical and audience response than is typical for crime films of the period.

Produced by Carlo Ponti and Georges de Beauregard through Rome Paris Films and Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, the film runs 108 minutes and was released in December 1962.