Another exercise in stoicism and crime from legendary French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai), in which hard men spend a lot of time giving each other hard stares. Over the course of 140 minutes, an escaped criminal (Gian Maria Volonte) and a newly released ex-con (Melville regular Alain Delon) fatefully meet, save each other’s life and plan an elaborate jewelry heist, all while hardly saying a word. Le Cercle Rouge doesn’t quite have the existential tug of Le Samourai, but certain sequences – most notably the intricately filmed heist – show a master craftsman at work.
