newjersian French detective stories have two trademarks: 1. If somebody walks or drives a car, it should continue at least 10 minutes. Meanwhile the viewer can go to the rest room and come back without losing anything. 2. Complete disregard of details and plausibility. This movie is full of it. For instance, the hero is shot in the shoulder. There's no blood and no hole in his coat. Later he's shown on the bed with an infusion. Suddenly, he decides to stand up and go away. He wrenches out the infusion tube from his vein, and again no blood shows up. Such a bloodless individual! However, when another hero is shot, the blood spurts out from the hole like a fountain without leaving any spot on the coat. The hole is exactly in the middle of his coat, so his spinal cord should've been smashed to smithereens. But that hero is able to walk and even make a call. In another scene he shoots two gangsters and places two guns with no finger prints on them next to the bodies. Apparently French police should believe that the gangsters accurately wiped out their fingerprints just before becoming cold. Maybe people love this fairy tale. But they could watch the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs. It's much more plausible than this movie.

gavin6942 Burglar Maurice Faugel has just finished his sentence. He murders Gilbert Vanovre, a receiver, and steals the loot of a break-in. He is also preparing a house-breaking, and his friend Silien brings him the needed equipment. But Silien is a police informer...American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino cited the screenplay for "Le Doulos" as being his personal favorite and being a large influence on his debut picture "Reservoir Dogs". This does not surprise me in the least. Melville really picked up the mantle of noir that the Americans had done in the 1930s and 40s, and then apparently just gave up on. Luckily, he did it right and influenced one of the greatest crime films of the 1990s.What I love about Melville more than the story-telling or characters is actually the use of color. Just so crisp, with every shot capturing this gritty world as it should be.

Martin Bradley Another tale of dishonor among thieves and another masterpiece from Jean- Pierre Melville but this one's a little more complicated than most. "Le Doulos" is slang for a hat but in criminal circles it also means a police informer. The informer here is Jean-Paul Belmondo and he seems to be playing one side against the other, police and crooks, but to what end? The movie is tortuously plotted until it's all very neatly and beautifully tied up at the end and it pays homage, not just to the great Hollywood gangster movies, but to such classically poetic French films of the thirties such as "Le Jour se Leve" and "Les Quai Des Brumes". Belmondo is, of course, magnificent and SergeReggiani is suitably fatalistic as the gangster who sets everything in motion. An absolutely essential movie.

Camera Obscura DOULOS: THE FINGER MAN (Jean-Pierre Melville - France/Italy 1962).Jean-Paul Belmondo is the duplicitous Silien, underworld criminal and police informer and Serge Reggianni as the dogged villain Faugel. Belmondo, who normally is a much more outgoing actor, has to play a very distant role as a gangster, much different than the wanna-be gangster he played in "AU BOUT DE Soufflé" (1959) by Godard (I know it's not soufflé but the IMDb doesn't accept my correct spelling). That's probably why Alain Delon became Melville's first choice in his later films, because Delon naturally had a much more restrained performance.Based on a novel from the famous série noire crime series, he made a film what he called 'my first real policier'. Perhaps there's a little too much emphasis on plot that has more than a few loopholes, as most film-noirs did, Melville's favorite inspiration for many of his films. I do think film-lovers are trying a little too hard to make this film into some kind of new forgotten masterpiece. By Melville standards, it still has quite a competent plot and does make sense but there's not really a central character like Bob in BOB LE FLAMBEUR or Jeff Costello in LE SAMOURAI to root for.Melville very much belonged to the Parisian post-war intelligentsia who were infatuated with American literature, music and above all, film. He was an ardent film lover and reputedly saw at least five films a day for a long period of his life. In LE DOULOS his obsession with American cinema becomes apparent. They drive American cars (and the occasional cool Citroën), behave like gangsters in American crime films of the '40s and Melville loves to use newspaper headlines to heighten some of plot elements, just like Godard famously did in AU BOUT DE Soufflé. French Melville aficionado Ginette Vincendeau put it best: 'Melville was a director very much influenced by American cinema but by no means someone who made copies of American films; in fact, he was a very French filmmaker'.I wasn't instantly captivated by this film as with LE SAMOURAI (1967), but the whole atmosphere, the ambiance, stunning camera movements and an almost perfect music score still make this a very agreeable Melville. This is cinema with style and class and a quintessential addition to the French gangster genre.Camera Obscura --- 8/10