After leaving prison, master thief Corey (Alain Delon) crosses paths with a notorious escapee and an alcoholic former policeman. The trio proceed to plot an elaborate heist.

The movie has its critics, particularly those who think it is too slow. And, indeed, even when cut down to 99 minutes and dubbed in English, critic Vincent Canby still found it to be a tad slow. Most of the film has no music, which keeps the pace slower, and there is the notorious heist scene featuring no dialogue for thirty minutes. For some, that may be intolerable.

Melville is a master, and possibly the most underrated director of his era. His name means nothing to so many people, and yet he never made a bad film. Even when relying on cliché (such as crossing a river to avoid detection), he does it with finesse.

LE CERCLE ROUGE is a very good film, though it does suffer a bit since there have already been similar films. In all too many ways, the movie is reminiscent of previous heist films such as RIFIFI and GRAND SLAM and many others. So, while director Melville and the actors did great jobs, it all seems like a case of Déjà vu. Because of this, I had a hard time giving this excellent film a higher score.

The one unusual aspect of the film is how the crooks get together. Instead of the usual means, Vogel escapes from prison and just happens to meet up with Corey, a career criminal just released from prison! Both are a good match but having them both work in parallel for much of the film until they meet was a clever touch. Apart from that, as expected much of the movie concerns the meticulous details in planning and executing the crime. I also appreciated how the film showed the crooks in such a cold and detached manner--something relatively common in French crime films but rare among American films until recent years.

Overall, extremely well-crafted and worth seeing...if you don't mind that it seems a tad repetitive, you'll see some fine acting, direction and a lot of great tension.

Everyone likes the coolly created, memorable heist movie. Alain Delon provides the antihero, Melville provides the cool, and a handful of other great talent (Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonte, and Andre Bourvil, mostly) arrives to add a crisp engaging movie...

...with very little dialog. This is great, because one certain aspect of the genre tends to be a lot of dialog involving the quick-witted and their various repartees. This movie, however, could be watched with the sound completely off and not too terribly much would be missed. Not to say the sound is bad, oh no, the jazzy soundtrack and the crisp audio catching the little movements makes the slow, patient deliberation of the patients very compelling.

What's also really neat about this film is that the color cinematography is pretty fantastic. Usually when it comes to cinematography, black and white movies tend to stick out in my mind, but this film has some very strong and beautiful imagery that makes the movie pure visual pleasure to observe.

--PolarisDiB