cult film freak: ALAIN DELON IN THE HIT-MAN NEO-NOIR THRILLER 'LE SAMOURAÏ'

Title: LE SAMOURAÏ American Title: THE GODSON Year: 1967 Rating: **1/2

It would be almost blasphemous in the crime genre neo-noir circles to say that Walter Hill's THE DRIVER, which is basically a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SAMOURAÏ, is superior... but Walter's Hill's THE DRIVER is superior to Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SAMOURAÏ... and vastly so...

Although looking terrifically cool around sparse settings and harboring an overall slow-burn cadence, Alain Delon's hit-man Jef Costello makes Ryan O'Neal's deliberately sluggish getaway driver seem like the rambling, semi-crooked, stubbornly determined token cop Bruce Dern, who almost single-handedly makes the Hill movie better than it would've been otherwise...

Alain Delon in LE SAMOURAÏ

While the SAMOURAÏ trailing cop role's played against type by French comic actor François Périer, holding so much back for a dramatic turn, he's hardly got the necessary pulse to counter-balance the lethargically mellow Delon, living in a nowhere apartment with an annoying bird who has far more to say...

In fact, after assassinating his initial target within the comparably intriguing first act, Delon doesn't actually speak until after an hour: getting a ride with one of several gorgeous, conveniently forgetful witnesses in Cathy Rosier, a black piano player in the nightclub he fatefully returns to... who's far more important than Delon's then real-life wife Nathalie Delon as the supposed leading lady...

Nathalie Delon in LE SAMOURAÏ

In THE DRIVER, Isabelle Adjani plays a composite of these two ladies: so the witness and the girlfriend becomes the witness who's also a kind of parenthetical love interest... but here, Delon's never given someone (or something) to personally invest in, or even to be an unapologetic lifelong loner against...

In the longest sequence, with our central assassin going through a twenty-minute ringer inside a police station line-up, LE SAMOURAÏ becomes a precise, by-the-numbers, style-over-substance police procedural (backed by what sounds like a symphonic old church pipe organ) that's simply not character-driven enough to make all these characters mean much of anything — beside looking ultra-stern and deathly-serious, and without a single trace of urgency.