Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville was one of the most important film-makers to emerge from post-war France. The son of Alsatian Jews, Melville was an active member of the French Resistance during the war, and also took part in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France in August 1944.

After the war, Melville found himself unable to access the French studio system directly, and so set up his own studio. His first feature, Le Silence De La Mer (The Silence of the Sea) (1949) was a very low-budget wartime drama, reflecting on the strained relations between an ordinary French family and a Francophile Nazi officer. The film was a critical and commercial success, and allowed Melville the freedom to continue making films through his own studios.

Melville's film-making style is particularly recognised for developing a "reportage" style of shooting (he was one of the first in French cinema to use real locations) as well as bringing American film noir sensibilities into French cinema, and is recognised today as being one of the key influences on the French New Wave movement.

Most of Melville's films (with the notable exception of the hugely influencial Les Enfants Terribles and a few others) are divided up between crime films and wartime occupation films. These two strains came to their conclusions with L'Armee Des Ombres (Army Of Shadows) (1969), a broad-canvas film charting one man's life in the French Resistance, and Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) (1970), a heist movie. Both were enormously influencial, with such film-makers as Jim Jarmuch, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo siting them as key influences.

Melville died of a heart attack in 1973, aged 55.



What members say | Filmography

Jean-Pierre Melville - what members say

Jean-Pierre Melville - filmography

5 most recent films

Un Flic - 3.5 stars
Le Cercle Rouge - 3.5 stars
Le Cercle Rouge - Blu-ray - 3.5 stars
Army Of Shadows - 4.0 stars
Le Samourai - 4.0 stars

5 highest-rated films

Le Samourai - 4.0 stars
Army Of Shadows - 4.0 stars
Le Silence De La Mer - 3.5 stars
Le Cercle Rouge - Blu-ray - 3.5 stars
Bob le Flambeur - 3.5 stars

5 lowest-rated films

Les Enfants Terribles - 3.0 stars
Breathless - 3.5 stars
Leon Morin, Pretre - 3.5 stars
Le Cercle Rouge - 3.5 stars
Un Flic - 3.5 stars

Most frequent co-stars

Alain Delon - 6 times - show films
Jean-Paul Belmondo - 5 times - show films
Laszlo Szabo - 3 times - show films
Jeanne Moreau - 3 times - show films
Richard Crenna - 3 times - show films

Most frequent directors

Jean-Luc Godard - 3 times - show films