Gallic Gangsters

By J.C.

THE GODSON

Directed by JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE Screenplay by JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE

The true title of this movie is Le Samurai--or was, anyway, until it was picked up for American distribution in the wake of The Godfather's huge success. The title is not the only thing that has been changed. The film has been perfunctorily dubbed into English, so that all the actors sound like waiters in a New York French restaurant. Scenes end abruptly, continuity and motivation are often tentative at best, for the movie has been somewhat truncated for U.S. release.

Despite all this, The Godson's elegiac mood and spacious sense of style reveal undeniably adept direction. Except for his Doulous -- The Finger Man, an atmospheric thriller that appeared in 1964, Jean-Pierre Melville's work has been little seen in this country. He himself popped up in Godard's Breathless, where he played a celebrated film maker giving an interview to Jean Seberg. In France, in deed, he is celebrated for melancholy Gallic exercises in gangsterism, American style.

In Le Samurai-The Godson, Alain Delon appears as a French gangster with the unlikely name of Jeff Costello, an icy and dogged professional who kills the manager of a Paris night club and then is set upon by the people who hired him. The flics, too, pursue Costello. He tries to work his way out of his classic quandary with characteristic efficiency, by dodging the cops even as he hunts down the men who are hunting him.

Like a samurai warrior, Costello is obsessed by ritual, whether it is pulling on a pair of white gloves before he uses his revolver or standing in front of a mirror adjusting the brim of his hat until it is just so. The hat, unfortunately, looks like a felt pie pan, and Delon moves mechanically through the action. Melville means to pay sober hom age to all the Hollywood films that did all this but better. It is a pity that for all its virtues, The Godson's patina of high seriousness renders every scene forced and selfconscious.

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