Le Samouraï
All team (13)
Short description
Jef Costello is a contract killer who works alone and lives by a strict personal code. After he shoots the owner of a nightclub, a pianist at the club sees him, and the police pull him in for questioning along with other suspects. A carefully prepared alibi and the pianist's refusal to identify him get him released, but the investigating superintendent keeps him under surveillance, convinced of his guilt. The people who hired him, alarmed that the police are circling so close, decide he has become a liability.
Jean-Pierre Melville directed and co-wrote the film with Georges Pellegrin, and it stands between Le Doulos and Army of Shadows in his filmography. Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, with François Périer as the superintendent, Nathalie Delon as Jane Lagrange, and Cathy Rosier as Valérie. The film was produced by Raymond Borderie and Eugène Lépicier and runs 105 minutes.
On IMDb it holds 8 out of 10 from around 65,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.8 out of 10 from about 1,300 votes. A critics' rating of 8.9 out of 10 from 51 reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on the novel “Ronin” by Joan McLeod.
- André Garret came to film the movie from the hospital. Before his death, he managed to dub his role. His line – “I’m warning you, Jeff, this is the last time” – sounds like a final farewell. Delon addressed the reply – “Agreed” – to a man who was already dead: his dubbing shift fell on the day of Garret’s death.
- The film opens with a phrase from the samurai code stating that a samurai’s loneliness can only be compared to the loneliness of a tiger in the jungle. Jean-Pierre Melville invented this phrase himself.
- The empty canary cage that the viewer sees at the very beginning of the film appears in the scene (the meeting of Delon and Michel Bon in the basement) of the film “Unvanquished” (1982) with a musical quote – a theme from “The Samurai”.
- At the 92nd minute of the film, in the scene where a girl is chasing Alain Delon’s character, a poster for the film “Accident” (1966) can be seen on the wall in the subway.
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