The first 15 minutes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos is one of the most perfect film noir openings: a lone man (Serge Reggiani) walks along a train track through a vague wasteland until he reaches a tiny house, enters, walks upstairs to an attic-like quarters where another man is appraising jewels, chats with the man before shooting him, steals the jewels, runs back outside to the wasteland and buries the loot underneath a single street lamp in the middle of nowhere (it might as well be on Mars). Melville here has beautifully set the bleak tone which will characterize not just the rest of this film but the best of the noir style that has preceded it. Le Doulos appears very late in the noir cycle, but in many ways it represents the apotheosis of the style; Melville would go on to create a variety of acclaimed crime films, but none would even attempt to capture the noir ethos like this. Reggiani’s world-weariness as Maurice Faugel is contrasted with the iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo’s cool confidence in the character of Silien, Faugel’s sometimes crime partner and always frenemy. Melville doesn’t dumb down the complicated, heist-centered plot — in fact, he leaves us in the dark about the characters and their relationships for long stretches of time — but uses narrative murkiness to enhance the impact. He also doesn’t tone down the indignities, particularly a sequence in which Silien punches, knocks out, binds, gags, and pours whiskey on the beautiful Thérèse (Monique Hennessy) and her otherworldly hourglass figure, sartorially exaggerated. Aside from a couple cringe-worthy rear projections during a driving scene, Melville creates cinematic poetry through symbolic shots and interconnections, most notably the hat-in-the-mirror shots that bookend the film.