The cinema world has many reasons to celebrate the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, but his centenary this year is as good a one as any. Born 1917 in Paris, he grew up movie-mad. In his youth, the Frenchman claimed to have haunted his local cinemas day and night, watching his first film at nine in the morning and not emerging until 3am the next day. It proved a fine film school. “I believe you must be madly in love with cinema to create films,” he once said. “You also need a huge cinematic baggage.” His movies would carry plenty.
Melville’s favourite cinema was of the hardboiled variety, those American crime flicks featuring laconic leading men in fedora hats, dangerous dames, and unhappy endings, which were later dubbed film noir by French critic Nino Frank. His love of Americana extends to his name. Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, but adopted the new moniker as a codename during the second world war in a mark of admiration and self-identification with his favourite writer, Herman Melville – “an author, an artist, who meant more to me than any other,” he said. After the war, it became his filmmaking nom de plume.
Melville’s films can be broadly split into two categories. There are his trio of films working through the traumas of war in Occupied France: début Le Silence de la Mer, from 1949; Léon Morin, Priest, from 1961; and Army of Shadows, from 1969. The rest are the existential crime films for which he is best known. An outlier is sophomore feature Les Enfants Terribles, a claustrophobic chamber piece following the dysfunctional codependent relationship between a sickly young man and his domineering sister.
It’s a more feverish picture than the ice cool thrillers (Le Deuxième Souffle, Le Cercle Rouge) for which Melville would become famous, and this added heat would appear to emanate from poet and author Jean Cocteau, who wrote the script and the novel on which the film is based. Cocteau, a celebrated filmmaker himself with films like Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949), chose Melville to direct on the strength of Le Silence de la Mer. The set of Les Enfants Terribles, however, was not a happy one.
Cocteau and Melville regularly clashed, particularly in the casting of Cocteau’s adopted son Edouard Dermit in the lead role, his movie star looks not equating to movie star charisma in Melville's eyes. The resulting film feels more indebted to its author than its director, but the expressive cinematography that plays with light and shadow, its concern with dangerous love triangles and the slap in the face ending would become Melville trademarks.