CINEMA In Codrolik, Second Breath. (Cameo Victoria, 'A' certificate.) J EAN-PIERRE
MELVILLE seems to be one of those film-makers whose work, like some wines, doesn't travel. Or perhaps, also like some wines, it travels perfectly well but is rarely given the chance. English audiences see Melville films at long intervals: Les Enfants Terribles (which eseryone anyhow remembers as Cocteau's film), Leon Morin, Pretre. But no one has imported commercially the movies which earned Melville his reputation among other film-makers: a romantic about America and the underworld.
Now comes Le Deuxieme Souffle, surely strangely translated as Second Breath rather than Second Wind. As a gangster thriller it is hard, restless, jabbingly tense. But running right through the film, like the name stamped in a stick of rock, are Melville's romantic allegiances. At the end they come tenaciously into their own— a final fifteen minutes in which the hero chooses to die by the code of the underworld, and even the cynical police inspector can hardly forbear to cheer. And although this may seem too extra- vagant by half, it must be admitted that it's strictly necessary to the conception. What makes this movie more than just a thriller is the steady pressure of Melville's puritanical romanticism.
Like many of the best genre films, this one has a plot of blinding ordinariness. Gus Minda, age- ing gangster, breaks out of prison, finds his way back to a Paris of unfamiliar one-way streets and new gang wars, is invited to join the robbery of an armoured van carrying a fortune in platinum. Triumph followed by disaster, when a police trick makes it seem that he has shopped his fellow thieves. Which, of course, is where the code of the underworld takes command.
In the course of the film there are eleven (I think) shootings, seven by Minda. But Melville films each killing so co;dly and quickly that it leaves no after-effect. For Minda (Lino Ventura) and his associates, the apprehension is not over killing, or having killed, but over who can be trusted, and for how long._The robbery of the van makes a brilliantly well-ordered sequence, but, for all its virtuosity, this is not the centre of the film. That is to be found rather in the scenes of Minda alone, celebrating his solitary New Year's eve over a log fire in a mountain hideout, with the alarm clock set for midnight, or re- peatedly changing buses as he treks patiently across France in his prim businessman's disguise. Or Minda in criminal company, faltering after every failure of nerve, regaining confidence when anyone remembers to treat him like the gang boss he was. A dogged, wily police inspector (Paul Meurisse) traps him : black cars converge, like a gangster's cortege, on a muddy seaside car park. Minda, businesslike when he thinks he is in the hands of a rival gang, goes wild with baffled rage when he realises that these are police- men cheating by playing at mobsters. By taking time, Melville doesn't diffuse attention but con- centrates it. In the end, like the inspector, one feels one knows the truth about Minda : Mel- ville's truth, admittedly and a truth for romantics of crime, but no less absorbing for that.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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