Critics reviews

Belmondo’s role in Léon Morin, Priest is certainly a singular one, which rests in great part on his sex appeal.

The director's attention to small, revealing behavior—which he typically used to generate suspense—creates a potent eroticism here . . . Yet Léon Morin is about more than unspoken desire—its ultimate concern is the unseen force of religious faith, in which the characters find solace during the Nazi occupation. Conceivably the most probing film about Catholicism ever made by a Jewish director, Léon Morin deepens the theme of tacit devotion that runs through all of Melville's filmography.

Riva provides the film with a startling cumulative force.

The new restoration includes two additional sequences, apparently cut after the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In the first, Barny is threatened by a collaborationist colleague who suspects her of sheltering a Jewish family; in the second, she suffers a crisis of conscience upon learning that a young girl with whom she is acquainted has been marked for death by the Resistance for fraternizing with the Germans... Both enrich what is a gripping movie, and also a great one.

It was incredibly daring to focus a film on theological debates between a communist atheist and a priest. The ambiguity of conversion, but also the frustration of repressed love, that's what Melville dramatized in this devastating masterpiece. The portrait of this priest out of the ordinary, out of time. A resistance fighter.

Ultimately, this is Riva's picture, with her astonishing emotional transparency giving heft to perhaps the closest Melville came to making a "women's picture," one infused with a sensitive feminine perspective mostly foreign from his stoic crime pictures. But Léon Morin, Priest even points the way for later films like Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge and, supremely, Army of Shadows.

Beautifully modulated with evocatively brusque fades to black and compositions that inventively position characters within the frame according to the movements of their power struggles, Léon Morin, Priest operates both as a faithful literary adaptation and a vessel for Melville's fatalist preoccupations.

The Film Center is right to make LEON MORIN, PRIEST the centerpiece of its short primer on iconic actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. Not just because it's a great film, and because it's a prime lesson in what makes Jean-Pierre Melville a great director, but because there's no Belmondo performance quite like it. It's he who plays Morin, with his usual cocky swagger transformed into an anarchic, absolute confidence.

The film falls in an odd, but decisive place in Melville's career, and if the film weren't quite so good as it is, it would be easy to dismiss as a cynical bid for credibility... As always for Melville the most touching image in the film is a gesture: a caress from Barny to the Vichy-sympathizer Arlette, whom she has recently slapped across the face.

Henri Decae provided the ritualized cinematography in a series of short uninflected vignettes centered on a spiritual duel between a nonbeliever and a true believer. It further establishes Melville as the last to be discovered and appreciated giant of the French New Wave of the '50s and '60s.

With his intense physicality Mr. Belmondo brings a shock of the carnal to every encounter.

A movie that moves with the diamond-cut precision and carefully constricting tension of Melville's trademark gangland sagas, the precious booty here being nothing less than the human soul, the price for an errant gesture the retribution of an even more fearsome underworld.