© 2015 by James Clark
With the catchment of the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and his acolyte Michael Mann—briefly entered by Roman Polanski in his Repulsion (not to mention a train-load of cosmopolitan auteurs getting away from it all by getting close to it all)—the camera’s acuity about the carnal timbre of the players is most important. In The Red Circle (1970) we have, amidst all its bespoke intricacies, a factor raising the bar as never before, namely, a dying actor getting by on much heart and much morphine, within a bolt of endeavor calling upon pretty high-toned vivacity. Veteran comedy and musical actor, Andre Bourvil, in the capacity of Commissioner Mattei, is introduced in the course of being bested by a young and violently buoyant felon who has become his responsibility to deliver to a Paris jail cell by way of a train ride originating, for the duo, from Marseille but having originated in Italy (and even including, rather quirkily, a German coach). The fugitive from justice has kicked out a window of their sleeping compartment in the crepuscule moments of early light when the weight of inertia weighs most dauntingly; and after unsuccessfully pursuing his charge through wooded territory and emptying his pistol in the general but not specific enough direction he returns to the now stationary chic vehicle where sophisticates show their wardrobes and breeding (one actually saying, “I say!”) en route to even more racy fun in the City of Light. The fugitive had, in the shadowy sleeper, shown one feature of his presence to be dominant, namely, a pair of gleaming dark eyes—the eyes of a ruthless predator. We soon discover that his name is Vogel (German for bird) and as he pounds through the rough terrain in his black suit jacket with white shirt and tie he could be a raven or a magpie, though the latter would belie his wordless bearing. Mattei, similarly sartorially elegant, shows us a pair of medically altered, faded eyes to match his chalky, carved-out facial features. Come to think of it, though, Vogel could be, more than anything, a hawk (with a problem of attaining to soaring and thus missing out on becoming an icon of masterful power and grace). And in his hapless victim’s phoning in his report of the incident he shows no overt embarrassment. “The prisoner I was accompanying has escaped.” Mattei may be on his last legs but his heart has not descended to the bathos of forgetting that others can be a handful and colleagues may either comprehend this or go to hell.
The depths welling up from this vignette create severe problems for the standard notion of The Red Circle. One other aspect of that volatile plunge through darkness in the Wagon Lit consists of Mattei’s temporarily opening the handcuffs to allow Vogel to settle in the upper berth. The rattle of the tracks, having begun with a clunky cadence, at the point now in view settles into a lighter rhythmic pattern. At this moment of an uncanny trace of freedom being glimpsed by both men, the camera shoots back from the confined space and we see the well-polished, dark train as a night-time bird of prey might see it. The French countryside loses its definition and we behold a material presence having been revealed to be much more than a material presence. Counterpointing this little saga of punishment delayed we have the little saga of Corey, who, that night was serving the final moments of a 5-year incarceration. We’re shown Corey in his far from Wagon Lit bed and we’re also especially shown his eyes in the darkness. His eyes are very different from those of Vogel. They resemble a doe in the headlights of a migratory route which steadfastly fails to fulfil her/his hopes. We had seen actor Alain Delon in Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), introduced also lying in a dingy bedroom, and in seeing him here we recall how, despite a repertoire of serenity akin to the strike of the train in that infinite void, susceptible to predations of those in his orbit he proved to be. As such, therefore, we are on notice that he is a player with sensibilities far closer to those of Mattei than those of Vogel. And yet, most commentators praise this film for displaying the reticent dignity of princes of the underworld. The Red Circle is far more complicated than that.
Even at a first viewing it should make a difference that Corey has every intention to depart the company of thieves and murderers. His last sleep in that cell is interrupted by a jail guard offering him an assignment to rob a Place Vendome jewellery shop. “I’ve known you for five years. You’re the only man for this job.” Corey’s presence of composed deftness implying that he was, until captured, a talented strategist of theft. However, we have to wonder if the remark says, “You’re the only one with the combination of nerve and smarts to bring it off;” or, “You’re the only one who could, after the task is completed, be readily cheated out of his share.” At any rate, he tells the defender of the peace, “Sorry, I’m not coming back here.” The rehabilitator points out that with his prison record Corey would never find a gratifying job. (Both the guard who explains, “I’m offering you the job because I can’t take risks… You can’t foresee them all” and the guard making rounds peer into the peep hole of the cell with eyes on the order of Vogel.) On getting dressed to face the world at large (showing a boyish physical makeup on the order of the Joan of Arc whom Jef in Le Samourai approximated) he collects his few belongings (not quite as modest as those of Leon Morin, priest, in the eponymous title for 1961; but still an indicator of far from palmy days) and goes directly to the penthouse of his former boss, Rico (all this happening in that dicey old town, Marseille), who happens to be asleep with the woman whose photo we see as part of the shabby inventory. Corey shows, in the boss’ peephole, to be a quite full person, not a harsh eye. Rico is something else, a bit like the guard with big ideas, in telling him he didn’t make any contact because, “during the investigation and trial, you didn’t mention my name. So I figured it was better for you and me.” “You don’t say,” a less-inclined-to-be-loyal-trooper Corey replies; and he goes on to ask for funds to launch the rest of his life. Rico tries to put him off; Corey easily locates a safe behind one of the tony paintings on the walls, and grabs the gun therein before his former boss does and also takes possession of a good wad of cash. “I’ll pay you back,” the new jobseeker tells him. Rico, with that now very familiar raptor style, utters rather coldly, “Yes, you will…” On his way along Rico’s street, he passes a couple of guys working on a garbage truck, racing after it to place the loads as he strides along in the opposite direction. He checks out a big black American sedan in a showroom but before he buys it and heads out of a town that seems to lack the right opportunities he’s intercepted by two of Rico’s foot soldiers. He beats them up and disarms them (those quick hands); but he doesn’t kill them, as a real jungle cat would do. Only after Corey’s noticing, from the comfort of a roadside diner, the slipping and sliding of Vogel through ice and snow, and on the basis of radio reports of his exploits (consequently making him sure to have left his trunk unlocked, a step leading to Vogel’s climbing inside), do Rico’s punks get shot dead (just as they almost carry out the execution of our protagonist)—by unexpected Vogel, at close range in cold blood, after emerging from the trunk with the pair of hand guns Corey had deposited there.
This would seem to be an instance confirming an apocryphal epigraph to the effect that “Men who are destined to meet will eventually meet.” It activates the supposition that Corey and Vogel are soulmates brought together by what Michael Mann calls “cosmic coincidence.” But the circus trick coincidence serves nothing so much as to signal that flaccid, wishful thinking on Corey’s part, that victim Vogel would be a viable partner, has all the forward momentum of stepping on a land mine. (The acquisition of the flashy car resembling Kiss Me Deadly’s Soberin’s car, no less, tells us much about his readiness to slog through socioeconomic thickets en route to a territory that could be truly big. The blood-smeared pack of money having been lifted from Corey’s chest pocket only to flood over with the ambusher’s blood—“End of the line, Corey!”—also implies that things are not on a very sound footing.) On leaving the travellers’ refreshment spot, with that carnage (not of his doing) still to come, Corey, as if ferrying out of harm’s way a self-evident saint, pulls off the freeway, parks his dream car, strolls to a vantage point (a rusty old farm implement) lined up to that trunk’s precious cargo and sits down where there ensues in an ice-strewn area a period of deep silence and stillness. We are at this point already well apprised—from various brushes with obvious pests and various savoring of the gifts of freedom (including his own positioning amongst streets and cafes)—of Corey’s practising a form of expansive body language informing his unsmiling face with a counterweight of tiny physical thrills. Sitting on that obsolete seat, he transmits the aura of an exiled prince tending to matters of wider morale. “Come out, the coast is clear,” he optimistically addresses what he, at the very least, hopes to be an effective knight. Vogel appears with one of his purloined guns leading the way. “Get your hands up,” he demands, and right from the get-go we see that the recruitment has fallen short. Corey’s “Fine way to thank me” is cut short with “How did you know I was there?… Answer my question…” Not even close to a cosmic coincidence; then Corey seeks to re-establish the ways of regal decorum. “After I lower my hands,” he insists, to an increasingly transparent peasant. “Rich to boot” Vogel snipes in taking in the car, though both of them are dressed well enough to fit in easily with most weddings. Corey has seen that the star of that day’s airwaves, though being something of a pinhead far down the food chain from his own volatile carnality, knows something about the value of rooted attitude and he accordingly shows the skeptic his release papers. “That’s unbelievable,” Vogel exclaims; and his benefactor tosses him his Gitanes (cigarettes) to get things started on the gypsy highway (a bit of a come-down from the King’s Highway but quickly seen to be viable in the eyes of our protagonist and newcomer to the death-trap of going straight). As Vogel devours his gypsy additive, his driver, not as yet questioning the logic of a notorious felon (Mattei mobilizing a small army in hopes of netting him, and thereby caught up in assurances of a social power centre) being the keystone of a gratifyingly constructive career, looks ahead in terms of, “Paris is your best bet.” The contretemps with Rico’s disappointing crew—an execution so viciously administered—would have had to move Corey along with his nebulous plans for not returning to jail. What began as a jaunty salute to the processors of his release as being somehow one of them, now becomes an aversion to jail on the order (though not likely the edge) of Neil’s mantra in Mann’s Heat.
(The more specific nature of Corey’s new and dismaying camaraderie reveals itself more incisively by way of cinematically magnified body language than by normal dramatic means. Let’s try to fathom our protagonist’s gambling spirit by bringing along that sensuous subtext of the meeting in the ice-crusted field. As Vogel chooses to be known as the tail-end of a revolver, poking the shiny rod through the narrow opening of the trunk, Corey [hearing “Hands up”] shows the beginnings of a smile that never reaches completion, as confirming that he was, deep down, expecting something like this. Vogel, aware of the near thing at a police roadblock minutes before, asks, with something more than bemusement on his face, “Why run a risk like that?” But he blusters ahead with, “Keep them up…Up!” And therewith Delon’s face and stance bring our way a chill of disappointment tracing back to roadblocks of the distant past, a past even before he was born. [Delon had had to do with a somewhat simpler, but not all that less self-destructive problematic of relations in Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers [1960].] The hands do come down, and as Vogel frisks his benefactor he asks, “Why weren’t you afraid?” “Of what?” Corey can’t resist quickly answering, his semi-gloom helping to sketch out who holds the high ground in this flat, raw field resembling a battlefield that somehow can’t depart antiquated salvos. Vogel, struggling to put together a bit of authoritative discernment, insists, “Of me, for instance… and that they’d find me in your trunk…” Rather than articulate his sangfroid, he answers by tossing to the flounderer the pack of Gitanes. Melville moves things along here on the order of silently conveying that Corey lives in an abyss. Throwing the lighter next brings Vogel to the point of pocketing the gun. There follows a few minutes when, eye-to-eye, they are overtaken by a jazz motif the muffled grinding of which marks them as sharing an alertness to finding the world more than ready to wipe them out. Vogel’s shakiness in lighting his smoke needs no further embellishment, and they stand about 15 feet apart, still eye-to-eye. Vogel tosses back the lighter, the exchange of these simple objects of comfort moving them closer to a partnership. His wild animal’s relief in experiencing a moment of steadiness leads to his giving a quick smile of gratitude to Corey. Then there is a pan, right to left, at mid-distance; and they both look around the various uninspiring sightlines because there is nothing to say. The carnivorous dispatching of the would-be murderers of Corey may carry a jet of over-eagerness to prove the extent of Vogel’s appreciation of such a factor as the one he called, quite aptly, if we can tease a phrase, “rich to boot.” Corey’s, “Come on, Paris is your best bet,” also implies [in word and deed] that he reckons that he could have done worse. Vogel, readily going back to the darkness of the trunk for the duration, delivers a handsome little speech in the circumstances: “In case we don’t meet again, thanks.”)
What others might regard as a horrific reversal appears to affect Corey—ever unsmiling, through good times and bad—as going on an extensive road trip when he had thought to be going into action at home. His first impression suggesting to us that he regarded the odds to be ridiculous at every turn, resurfaces in his persisting with the Paris destination (“bet”) as a hive possibly too numerous to police. The prospect of a jewel heist, formerly brushed off as dead in the water, now comes about as not exactly senseless but an unenviable resort to a Triple A replacement for an Ace (a fantasy Ace) having left the scene for Tommy John surgery. Let’s see, in the following, how often he seems to relish (in his own impassive way) the mere entry to the field, irrespective of outcome.
Re-entering the picture to lend more credibility to Corey’s way of brushing off any playoff hopes, Mattei, left as he is with that Wild Card, sudden-death moment of truth, reports upon his failure to the leading brain of lawfulness in France, the Inspector General. The latter’s name is not of course that non-joiner, Sherlock Holmes; but his office, in striking contrast to the drabness marking the rest of the security facility, is a Victorian redoubt fussed and cluttered to the nth degree. And from out of that design funk he holds forth on the raison d’être of his career, not the mere apprehension of law-breakers (though he does deliver a dig apropos of Mattei’s “efficiency in arresting criminals”), but that cosmic discovery, having become an idée fixe, to the effect that humankind are intrinsically corrupt. “They’re born innocent, but it doesn’t last.” Whereas Mann’s faulty but piquant philosophers tend to work on the other side of the bars, here we have an alpha bureaucrat at large who can’t let go of the platform he’s reached as a way to lose himself in not only the nineteenth century but the Old Testament. Coming away from the turning of a new page (the boss laughing off his statement of being ready to resign)—“I’ll find him”/ “I’m sure you will”—Mattei asks a staffer, “Was he kidding?” “It’s his doctrine. Crime lurks within us. We have to flush it out,” the supervisor insists.
Thereby the nebulous bid for integrity on the part of Corey comes under pressure by a public security regime not only extraordinarily doctrinaire but dead to the seductions of the mystery train. The Inspector cues up Mattei the hunter, who had reported seeing innocence in the corridors of arrest (“I’ve dealt with so many suspects who were innocent”), in such a way as to guardedly demand bringing into effect informants in the underworld. “You’re to find Vogel by hook or by crook. No matter what the cost” [in self-respect]. And by this route we encounter a cornucopia of figures performing a baseline of energy pertaining to the lacunae of our butterfly, Corey. Mattei checks out a bar/supper club the owner of which, one Santi, is in the know but adamantly averse to ratting on lawless malcontents who may have a point. As with Paul Ricci in Melville’s Second Wind (1966), the hot spot features entertainment drawn from the Jacques Demy playbook. Here we have a troupe of less than elite hoofers using a routine of self-conscious sexiness (and thus not) which reminds us of Delphine and Solange, the young girls of Rochefort, hoping to be in the same league as Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (In a first reconnoitre of the club where information awaits being pried out, there were, lounging decoratively, a cute blonde and a cute brunette in mini-skirts.) Only, whereas the sisters in the Demy amaze themselves by briefly breaking through to a range of the sublime seldom seen in Rochefort, or anywhere else, the girls in our film are simply brutal, thereby inviting us to assimilate the bouillabaisse of high hopes coming down in flames here. Mattei is shown to be not only a spent physical force dragooned into tactics which don’t suit him. But we have access to his returning to his Paris flat and gushing to his three fat cats (as he feeds them after the 3-day absence due to Vogel), “Come on, my children!” Sensuality gone to fat, of which we have an epidemic here. (Other versions of “red circle” might come to demand a place in this work; but the biggie is the small-pox blemish entailing a deadly plague. The Inspector General was a simplistic jerk; but, like his hero, Holmes, he was good at ferreting out [Victorian] facts, even if nuances were not his thing.)
“Paris is your best bet,” Corey had decided; and now, here they are, in the home town of Mattei (as ensconced in a building called Ronsard Village, referring to an antique poet who was deaf) and the Inspector General. This was also the home town of the girl in the photos and in Rico’s bed while Corey was acquiring some funds, she having abandoned the City of Light for grotty old Marseille, but having kept her unit in the Capital. And as we catch up with the wanderers we find that the one-time lover had had the presence of mind to keep his set of keys to that tentative goldmine. As the new friends enter we get a whack of the real story struggling to make a difference within the locomotive (so seldom cosmically piercing) of a cops and robbers chase. It’s a dark place at night-time, but the filmy curtains pick up golden glows from the streets and shops below. And (You know what?), those honey sprays amidst jet-black corners and silhouetted furnishings penetrate the silent fugitives in those first seconds at a haven as good as it gets for them. On reaching for the phone, Corey is suddenly (unhappily) aware of the cobwebs and dust enshrouding it and everything else in this tomb-like cul-de-sac. He comes to a large version of the photo of her we saw him leave prison with. He drops it into a waste basket, having moved beyond the sweepstakes of affection she once (briefly, no doubt) maintained. (Another of the Inspector General’s axioms—especially aimed at fading Mattei—was, “We all change for the worse.” The cut to Santi’s dancers shows ten women, each with a blonde bouffant, like the former lover, who, we can be quite sure, was not a rare commodity.
From out of this dusty sanctuary—the design-conscious desperadoes having soon cleaned it up—Corey becomes convinced that the jewellery heist he formerly considered completely wrong now stands out as not so completely wrong. He brings Vogel on board, and a marksman, and a fence. He tensely enjoys the success of the operation; his fence fails him (having come under the sway of resentful Rico, also ready to provide the police with the names of those involved in the double-murder); Santi agrees to help Mattei nail Vogel et al, under threat of having his drug-dealing, college boy son jailed (this trap being made functional by Vogel’s insistence that Santi could be depended upon to provide them with a replacement fence); so-called replacement fence Mattei becomes contiguous with Corey, Vogel and the marksman and in that contiguity Corey, Vogel and the marksman are soon shot dead, little red circles peppering each body.
This narrative machinery is given a very accomplished facade and most viewers think that’s enough. I’m here to tell you that Melville did not think that’s enough. The serious drama underlying this flashy melodrama pertains to a clutch with expensive tastes having not only failed to pay the price but in the course of which brought to (less than obvious) view how very costly true integrity turns out to be. The sharpshooter, Jansen, played by longstanding French superstar, Yves Montand, performs with real authority a rejuvenative arc as the one-time police stalwart who has lost a taste for policing a populace neither virtuous enough nor evil enough to take seriously (which is to say, has turned his back upon vigorously investigating self-contradictory entities), gone on from there to—in a room the decorator- wallpaper of which jumps out at those of us who have seen the wallpaper of Jef’s place in Le Samourai—enjoy alcohol until he imagines insects and lizards jumping out at him and then be remembered by Vogel as just what they need. His pulling himself together for the challenge of producing his trademark special alloy bullets and relearning how to hit the mark to do the trick of disabling the security system of a Place Vendome Jeweller goes so far as to have him—when steeling himself in his tux as covered by a spiffy trench coat—resemble Fred Astaire in Funny Face. His chic wardrobe, appropriate for either a wedding, a funeral or a Nobel Prize address, stands in marked contrast to the (out of character) laborers garb of his partners whose tasks that night require circus stunts. Though having energies in common on a broad scale, one has to see this very eccentric gang of three as far from on the same page. Jansen (invoking all the rebel-heretic Jansenist business in Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest), in the aftermath of his facing down his demons as far as he knows them, refuses to make any claims on whatever revenues might finally start flowing. “Thanks to you, I locked the beasts away.” But his solicitude for those partners impels him to help Corey make a break from Mattei. Vogel, too, risks a reunion with the guy he shared a sleeper with, in order to get Corey (who never wanted to pursue the link with Santi, anyway, being at heart far more an ontological drifter than an affluent punk [like Rico]) out of the trap set by Mattei, very much at this point a self-serving opportunist, no longer fascinated by shades of innocence and shades of guilt.
Le Cercle Rouge is very much a saga about connecting. But the spate of stylish machination, gilded by eccentric reticence, leaves most viewers convinced as being the film’s heart and soul, even though a bit of discernment would show it to be as bloodless as Santi’s starlets. It’s pretty easy to entice movie-goers into a self-evidently trivial diversion (their “real” lives being, it seems, so profoundly complicated that movies shine in being sentimental relief). But Melville is, I think, at the very center of a cinema totally at odds with that industry and those consumers. Thus he directs his audience to moments like the exteriors and the interiors of the march upon Maison Plouvier (that name, plover, reminding us of the name Vogel) being ever so slightly and ever so crucially a comedown from Corey’s former girlfriend’s fountain of frisson. The palace they crack is a veritable Bête’s chateau (with a grand staircase and magnificent corridors and so they don velvet black masks in indirect homage to the shock but also the gentle eyes of that strange resident cat (the author of which, Jean Cocteau, Melville joined in his Les Enfants Terribles [1950]). And yet, for all that paraphernalia, something is missing. The heart of the film is one’s being touched and galvanized by such shortfalls.
So it is that the first thing this hugely inflected movie brings our way is an epigraph, like that of Le Samourai, being obtuse but usefully obtuse. “The Buddha drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: ‘When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day they will, inevitably come together in the red circle.’” The pat determinism is belied by the astronomical freedom implied by the slowly circling green figurine of the Buddha, amidst infinite darkness, coming to resemble a casualty in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. Those who would relish “meeting” (in cosmic coincidence) have to do with a “red circle,” an unforthcoming, hostile, deadly (and plague-like) surround, far from a gratifying machine. Toting a leather bag full of treasure that bites, en route to a forested estate at night, (not so unlike the home of La Bête; not so unlike the big city retreat of Soberin’s), where he parked a black (not white) pack of horsepower, leaving Jansen back there in the Christina seat, Corey is as much a Rose Bowl float as a crook selling some ill-gotten valuables. But we are struck by his animal death throes when it all goes wrong. Mattei is a picture of self-disgust as he drifts amidst the one-sided battlefield and listens to the worse-than-dead overseer reiterate, “All men, M. Mattei…” There is no mushroom-shaped cloud to put its stamp upon this disaster. But the sense here of almost incredible errancy towers in its own way.
The last two words are: own way.
One of the best films from this director, hard to say if I like this or Le Samourai more. A great heist movie, atmospherically filmed. Good to see Mr. Clark has taken the bull by the horns with this one.
That’s a great expression, Frank, taking “the bull by the horns,” with regard to a filmmaker so consistently absorbing that it’s a daunting task trying to choose the best of them all! Melville has been dead a long time; but there’s nothing dead about his work!
This is my favorite Melville, and considering my affinity for his canon that is a very strong commendation. What I love most is the way the scenes are so understated, and how the social mileau is so accurately conveyed. Alain Delon is marvelous as are Gian Maria Volante and Yves Montand. Yes as a heist film it is one of the best and Melville superly shoots in color. Jim you have again gone to glorious lengths to frame this intelligently and comparatively. I do share your love for this brilliant artist.
Thanks, Sam!
The Red Circle is, indeed, a riveting disclosure of lawbreakers and lawmakers alike, putting their all into being able to stand themselves. Everybody in sight goes way overboard in this study of a contagious plague.
Melville is a master of setting in relief a world history few people notice. Another such master is Hou Hsiao Hsien and I can hardly wait to see his Assassin!
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