WARNING: SPOILERS 

This is pretty superficial criticism so bear with me.

When hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) leaves for a new assignment, he goes through various machinations to make sure he isn’t followed. He quietly steals a car and takes it to a back-alley garage, where a man with a cigarette dangling from his lips wordlessly changes the license plate. He gets his woman to provide alibi #1 and the poker-playing men in the back room to give him alibi #2. (Though if he hadn’t been there, would he have been picked up in the first place?) Only after all that, does he go to the nightclub to kill the target. All of it is very smart, very careful, very methodical.

So why does he wear the fedora?

I get it: It helps hide his face. But it’s Paris in 1967. The only men wearing fedoras anymore are ancient, not handsome hipsters like Alain Delon. He stands out like a sore thumb.

Yes, there’s that scene in the police station where all the suspects show up with their own trenchcoats and fedoras, but that’s really the only time we see anyone else wearing one. In the scenes in Paris? On the streets or in a nightclub? Nobody’s wearing one. Jef wearing one is like a flashing red light to any passerby. Notice me! I don’t fit in! You expect someone to ask, “You heading to a costume party?”

In a way, he is. It’s the French New Wave, and they want to Bogart up the joint. But it makes everything else nonsensical. 

Ce n’est pas lui
I keep wanting to like the movies the cool kids like, like this one, which was shown in a 4K restoration at SIFF Egyptian last month. And I liked it well enough. “Le Samourai” is a not-bad procedural, and I like procedurals. It’s a procedural from both the criminal end and the cop end. I liked the parrot. I liked the girl. All the girls, really: Jane (Nathalie Delon), La pianiste (Cathy Rosier), La jeune fille du vestiare (Catherine Jourdan).

But did I like Alain Delon? Did I like the cop (Francois Perier playing Le Commissaire)? I guess I liked how unlikeable the cop was. He's not exactly Louis Jouvet in “Quai des Orfevres.” 

So Costello does the hit, he’s seen by both the pianiste and the hatcheck girl, he goes to the card game for his alibi but is immediately picked up by the cops. In the round-robin version of “Is this the guy?” some finger him, some shake their heads, nah, while the pianiste totally refutes what we know she saw: Ce n’est pas lui. Jef is released.

Except the next day, when he goes to collect his payment, he’s nearly killed by the courier. Apparently the bad guys now see him as a liability. And he doesn’t know who the bad guys are. He doesn’t know who hired him.

So he returns home, treats the wound in his arm, returns to the club to meet the pianiste, Valérie, because he figures she didn’t finger him because she knows who hired him. She doesn’t deny it but delays her response. She says call me in two hours. Not sure why he agrees to this but he does. And when he does, there’s no answer.

All this time, people are breaking into his nondescript flat. The police plant bugs, bad guys hole up there ready to ambush him, and his parrot keeps letting him know—by being agitated, losing feathers, etc. The bird is the smartest thing in the film. The bird and Jef’s bird—Jane. The cops try to squeeze her but she ain’t having it. She remains loyal. That’s a good scene.

Eventually, the courier pays him and offers another gig. Instead, Jef forces the name of his employer from him: Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier). Sure. Jef evades half the Paris police force to go to Rey’s place, which also happens to be Valérie’s place, and kills the guy. Then he shows up at Valérie’s job and seems ready to kill her, too. Was that the secondary job? Except from the get-go it’s more suicide mission: he gives up his beloved fedora, hangs next to Valérie’s piano in full view of everyone, and pulls his gun. After he’s mowed down by half the Paris police force, it's discovered that the gun was empty.

So it was a suicide mission. Because? French shrug.

Trente-neuf
Anyway, it’s got a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and all the cool kids like it. In 2010, it was ranked the 39th greatest film of all time by Empire magazine. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote:

 “Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of Le Samourai before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words.”

The light thing is true, and that's a good description of it. But I’m curious if the young cool kids consider the title cultural appropriation. Not to mention Bogie’s fedora—if cultural appropriation goes in that direction.