MUBI

Jean-Pierre Melville doesn’t so much pay homage to the American gangster with this shadowy gem starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani, but reinvent him with his own brand of existential trappings and the usual display of trust and mistrust amongst hardboiled men. The title refers to the underworld slang for the “rat”, and Melville gives us everything we need to almost decipher if Belmondo has indeed informed on Reggiani and his plans to caper a businessman’s safe, but being the consummate stylist, Melville cares more about the atmosphere and look of his gangsters than he does about our perceptions of the characters, which makes the twist and careful expository flashback at the end all the more necessary, and baffling. Whether or not one character may have tipped off a friend in the detective squad is beyond the point, we’re to assume that in this world of guns, trench coats, fedoras, underdeveloped molls, and double and triple crosses, friendship is worth as much as the loot behind the next unguarded safe door, who you step on and over to get at it is just another notch in the ethical degradation of the melting pot. The substance of Melville’s style is a mixture of film noir shadows, Americanized wardrobe, characters with suspect morals, and a fluidity of montage, which is so perfectly realized and invisible than when it all but stops, during an unbroken 8-minute Belmondo interrogation scene, it’s so flawless we hardly notice.