“At a time in the early '50s when film noir was dying in the States, Jean-Pierre Melville kept the torch alight (in France) with films like Bob le Flambeur and Le Doulos, where he lovingly resuscitated a world in which laconic men in trenchcoats came through the door with a gun in each hand; and he then handed back the flame to the Americans when Hollywood entered its modernist phase of noir....” Chris Peachment, National Film Theatre
