Alain Delon gives one of his best performances as "Le Samourai," so called in obvious homage to the Japanese "masterless ronin" 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 Jean-Pierre Melville's own stylization. For 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 the chilling hero, with even sparer dialogue; and lots of silence. When Le Samourai was released here in 1972 as The Godson, one of the few to notice it was Penelope Gilliatt. Writing in the New Yorker, Gilliatt 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 who assassinates to order... 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... Like Melville, Alain Delon was never as good as this before. (Le Samourai) is cold, masterly, without pathos, and not even particularly sympathetic: it has the noble structure of accuracy."