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DVD Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) - Criterion Collection
Crime cinema has never been so meticulously and coolly executed. Taciturn thief Alain Delon (intense and dapper in trenchcoat and fedora) and escaped prisoner Gian Maria Volonte cross paths as if by fate, bound by saving each other's life, and join with disgraced ex-cop Yves Montand for their next job: a daring jewel robbery. Le Cercle Rouge is the ultimate expression of the romantic doom that Jean-Pierre Melville established in his masterpieces Bob Le Flambeur and Le Samourai. The centerpiece heist, a wordless 20-minute sequence with masked men communicating in codified gestures, is a tour de force of cinematic efficiency that tops even Rififi in its celebration of criminal skill and nerve. Melville's cool detachment doesn't allow us to really warm up to these uncompromising pros, but his cinematic precision is spellbinding and his unforgiving world of loyalty, professionalism, sacrifice, and codes of honor is an irresistible underworld fantasy.
The Criterion DVD restores the film, which was originally cut by 40 minutes for its American release, to its full-length director's cut. Additionally, it features new interviews with Melville's assistant director Bernard Stora and friend and expert Rui Nogueira, rare archival interviews with the director and his cast, and a new introduction by filmmaker and Melville fan John Woo among its wealth of supplements. --Sean Axmaker
Review(s): DVD Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) - Criterion Collection
A gangster film , but forget Cagney or the Godfather
As the Beatles took America's music and put their own spin on it , so the French took the American gangster film - one filmmaker above all . Jean - Pierre Melville is the director in
question . He does not feel the need to rush things and takes you more into the world of the characters , showing you how they live .
The more I think about it , I more I see similarities between this film and THE FRENCH CONNECTION - no pun intended .
They both show hardbitten people and their worlds .
This is a great film , good for a rainy day .
You get a real feeling of the clinical way the characters look at their professions . The film has a wintry atmosphere , as if something is shortly coming to an end .
If you like this film , then I recommend you watch for another release by this director called LE SAMOURAI , again starring Alain Delon . That film is also being released by Criterion .
It is the sort of subject you may be familiar with , but presented in a different style .
A classy film , with a fine story .
I will always come back to this film and encourage other viewers to discover Melville's films .
Icy cool, well directed French heist flick
A cool, captivating crime film from France, starring Alain Delon as a recently paroled convict who falls instantaneously into a no-nonsense world of larceny and murder. The plot is pretty standard fare -- a paroled con, a fugitive and an ex-cop join forces to pull a big heist -- but the production itself is stylish and taut. Good, gripping story... recommended!
Cool, but clumsy...
Maybe I am missing more then I think I am, but would you try to organize a heist with a fugitive whom the whole country is after? I think not. The cinematography is great, the silence is great, Yves Montand is great, but Allain Delon as a cold, calculating thief? Again, I think not. A complete miscast, including the ridiculously silly get-up - the trenchcoat (which is not taken off even during a game of billiards). The man sticks out as a sore thumb everywhere he goes. Also, not to nitpick, but even for a movie where fast, cheap action is supposedly not important, that train escape is even more ludicrous. Jumping through the barrely broken window of a moving train? Why not try to overcome the decrepit inspector, who's still tired from the sleep and has his back turned on you? The script contains too many holes, which were amplified by the clumsy execution of the few "action" scenes. Give me Jean Paul Belmondo or any of the american noir faces (Richard Widmark, RObert Mitchum...) any day of the week over these guys. I really liked when the sharpshooter just took out the rifle from the stand and hit the keyhole during the heist. Sweet. Unfortunatelly, he is involved with Corey, who just got out from jail and wanted to get back in there quickly again. Thus, he is trying to unload the jewelery to the guy who would not take it, even after he had agreed to do it, knowing it would be "hot". Hmm. Too many Deus ex Machina situations, too many silly and unbelivable characteers, too many cigarettes. Music's cool though.
Related DVD's Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) - Criterion Collection
The train robbery sequence has all the realism of an episode of The Thunderbirds. I'm sorry, but if you could see the wires on the model helicopter in 2005, you could have seen them in 1972. The first 20 minutes, a bank heist by the sea, on the other hand, is Melville at his halucinatory best. This movie is worth seeing if you are a Melville fan and want to see a primary source of material for Tarantino, but if you want to see great, late Melville, stick to Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Alain Delon - Richard Crenna - Catherine Deneuve Director(s): Jean-Pierre Melville DVD Release Date: Released the 24 July 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Anita Ekberg Director(s): Federico Fellini DVD Release Date: Released the 21 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A member of the middle generation of French filmmakers between Renoir and the New Wave, René Clément was a strong visual stylist who tried on different subjects and genres: documentaries, semidocumentaries, wartime dramas, comedies. In Purple Noon he showed a strong facility for feverish film noir, and the results are quite memorable. Based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, the film stars Alain Delon as the notoriously amoral Ripley (a character also played, albeit quite differently, by Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders's The American Friend). Envious of a playboy pal (Maurice Ronet) having a luxurious time on the Mediterranean, Ripley decides to murder the man and assume his identity. The subsequent suspense concerns the dirty deed... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Alain Delon - Maurice Ronet - Marie Laforêt Director(s): René Clément DVD Release Date: Released the 02 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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