In 1955, with Bob le flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville anticipated the nouvelle vague by some four years (Godard acknowledged the debt by casting Melville as the arrogant literary godfather Parvulesco in Breathless). If critic Georges Sadoul characterizes Melville's style as "economical and unflamboyant," this does not mean that Melville doesn't revel in the tricks of that particular trade: distancing devices (jarring jump cuts) combined with fast-paced camerawork; spare interiors explored, like his chilling protagonists, with even sparer dialogue; and lots of silence. Alain Delon gives one of his finest performances as "Le Samourai," so called in obvious homage to the Japanese "masterless ronin" in the films of Kurosawa and others. A killer by contract in the world of Paris nightclubs and hidden bosses, he has a polished, highly stylized method perfectly suited to Melville's own style. When Le Samourai was released here in 1972 as The Godson, one of the few critics to notice it was New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt, who called Melville "the poet of the implacable" and Le Samourai "a fascinating and important picture...a sort of meditation on solitude embodied in a lonely, rigorous mercenary.... It is a study of someone who listens all the time and seems to be responding to harmonics beyond most people's range. Odd that it should be possible to give a killer so many of the attributes of the sanctified...."