Le Doulos

Le Doulos is a black-and-white French-Italian crime picture from 1962, sitting between neo-noir, detective story and thriller. Its title is underworld slang: a "doulos" is both a kind of hat and a police informer, as the opening titles explain. Jean-Pierre Melville wrote and directed it from the novel of the same name by Pierre Lesou.

A man just out of prison starts preparing a new robbery. He settles a score for an old friend, then turns to a newer one for help, and trust, betrayal and the question of who is informing drive what follows. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani lead the cast, with Jean Desailly, Michel Piccoli and Dominique Zardi also appearing. Melville kept the novel's plot largely intact but added his own bleak mood and ambiguity.

Shooting ran from April to June 1962 at Melville's Jenner studio in Paris and on the city's streets, with Volker Schlöndorff among the director's assistants. It drew close to 1.5 million admissions in France, and critics, at first divided, came to count it among Melville's canonical works. English-speaking cinemas showed it as The Finger Man. Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have named it among the best gangster films.