On Sunday I caught a screening of
Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) released in English as
Any Number Can Win and also, wonderfully,
The Big Snatch. The print was widescreen (2.35:1) and black & white. YouTube hosts colour snippets that look like a digital treatment but these may have been contemporary. The film is clearly trying to match itself with Hollywood and dipping Alain Delon in what looks like pancake batter might have been part of the effort. Forget them: the monochrome version is better -- gorgeous, in fact, in the way that old & white films are: a holiday for the eye.
Mélodie is a casino heist and much of the action unfolds in sunlight, from the opening shot on a bright morning in Paris Gare du Nord to the poolside
dénouement in Cannes, and the intermediate tones are appropriate to the story. It doesn't paint its exotic locales in the sinister velvet-black of, say,
Notorious (1946). It's a noir-lite: a large grey. When Francis (Delon) gives up the wheel of his Alfa to his Swedish girlfriend, she drives at a sensible speed.
Critics have noted the similarity between
Mélodie en sous-sol and
Rififi (1955) -- as if any heist movie could escape the comparison -- but its true antecedent is
The Killing (1956), right down to the (spoiler alert) ending. In the final scene of
The Killing Kubrick's thieves are undone when the money is blown away on the airport tarmac: in
Mélodie the bills float gracefully to the surface. Francis's mentor Charles (Jean Gabin), surrounded by police, can only watch for fear of giving himself away; Francis, shamed, simply turns his back, and the cops rush past, unaware of the thieves right under their noses. The construction of these final moments is stark and modern and genuinely tense-making: as good as anything De Palma or David Fincher has served up.
In between lie the delights of any film older than you are: the glimpses of street scenes, the chugging cigarettes (Francis's mother scolds him for smoking), the measures of drink (for a sunbathing tipple, fill half a tumbler with scotch, add two small ice cubes and serve. Ye gods), the casino dancing girls with real bodies and action sequences without stunt doubles. In one lengthy unbroken shot Delon climbs out of a hatch, runs up a thirty-degree tiled roof and monkey-bars along a crenellated cement facade twenty feet off the ground wearing a tuxedo and leather dress shoes; later he drops ten feet, forgets the bag he is carrying and hops back up to retrieve it, like a gymnast.
Because this is a noir, it's all for naught. The point is not that the heist goes wrong but how, and why, and director Henri Verneuil renders the fatal misstep with the same balletic ease. You truly won't see it coming.
Mélodie en sous-sol is far from the greatest noir you could see but then again, noir is not about individual achievement. It's about being part... of... a... team.
Mélodie en sous-sol was based on the novel
Once a Thief by John Trinian, who died in 1974. By day Trinian was
Zekial Marko, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who worked for shows such as
The Rockford Files and
Kolchak: The Night Stalker. By night, in the 1960s as Trinian, he published a
small, eclectic set of mystery and crime paperbacks including
North Beach Girl and
Scandal On The Sand. Could one have a cooler obituary?