Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.

The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.

For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.

Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.

Melville seems to peer out from behind the camera with a reassuring wink and nod. Le Cercle Rouge is the most self-consciously cool of his famously underheated films noirs.

Key action points are edited with finesse, but the denouement, with its dutiful hail of gunfire, is heartless and mechanical.

If you've got the patience, this is still one of the all-time exercises in cinematic cool.

i wanted to like this movie. i really did. but in the end, it just didn't hold up to other good, similar genre movies of the same time period. I had a major problem with the decisions of the characters in the film. Also the movie is not tight enough. Overall the storyline is weak. it just didn't have that hook, that special intangible aspect to make it a cool movie. It was just sort of bland and the acting was just decent in my opinion except for yves montand of course. A main problem of mine was how vogel and corey met in the first place. That whole scene was just too much to be coincidental. I didn't buy it at all. In fact I thought the entire thing had been arranged beforehand somehow, which would have made a way better plot line. But to tell me that vogel is running, checks the trunks of all the cars and just happens to find corey's open is too much. And then corey, a man just released from prison, goes right along with it without skipping a beat. This movie is just a long, slow, weaker version of Rififi. What is most bothersome is that instead of the crooks being cool and crafty, they are lame and blundering. No wonder the movie starts out with them captured or in jail-- I'm not surprised (and they ended up dead-- duh, saw that coming)! Other ridiculous things: "Hey I just got out of jail-- how about I buy a car with dirty money from a rival criminal?!" "Hey, let's recruit the new gang member at a known hangout for gangsters!" "Hey, we can poorly tie up the guard right next to the alarm button!" "Hey, let's leave the rope ladder with our fingerprints all over it hanging from the roof of the jewelry shop!" "Hey, let's steal millions in jewelry and have ONE possible buyer for it all!" I could go on and on... (continuing with the fact that the tip of this "easy heist" came from a POLICE GUARD!). Yves Montand actually is the onlycharacter that's interesting with any sort of depth in this entire movie. And at least he's not stupid enough to die by getting SHOT IN THE BACK while RUNNING AWAY! Le Cercle Rouge is an interesting film to have seen, but i have no intention in rewatching it. It's way to dry to be entertaining or interesting. Melville's other work Le Samourai, is one of my favorite movies of all time though