“Breathless” (1960)
If the European neo-noir has a granddaddy, it is of course “Breathless” (or “À bout de souffle”), the directorial debut of Jean-Luc Godard and a movie that revitalized the future of the crime genre by nodding to its past. The filmmaker, alongside fellow French New Wavers Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (who’d penned a treatment that the film was based on), were devotees of pulp fiction and American movies, and it shows utterly in the movie, which sees Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Bogart-idolizing petty criminal killing a policeman and attempting to flee with the help of his American lover Jean Seberg. Chaotic, full of energy and mixing a documentary-like realism with a formal experimentalism, this film is punch-drunk in love with cinema (“I love it, yet at the same time I have contempt for it,” Godard said in an interview at the time), right down to being dedicated to Hollywood B-movie producers Monogram Pictures, and featuring a cameo from another great Gallic crime director Jean-Pierre Melville. Appropriately, it was a shot heard around the world: few films can be said to have changed the artform as much as “Breathless” (far more so than “The 400 Blows” the year before), and the film carries the same power to shock for new viewers over half a century on. Apart from its impact, the film nevertheless works beautifully as a hardboiled noir that Cagney or Edward G. Robinson would have been proud of, hitting some familiar beats but delivering them in utterly fresh ways.
“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” (1971)
Elio Petri‘s Foreign Language Oscar-winner manages to be both a chilling, intellectual thought experiment in terms of its story and a visceral blunt force trauma in terms of its brilliantly bold filmmaking. With unswerving focus on lead Gian Maria Volonte, whose whole performance feels, appropriately for a sociopath, like he’s constantly only working out how he should appear the moment before the emotion registers, Petri almost hounds him, as though the camera itself were his shadow, or perhaps the conscience he ignores but cannot fully escape. Volonte plays a tellingly unnamed police inspector, who in the opening scene casually murders his mistress during sex, then wipes the place clean of most traces of his presence while deliberately planting others. He then is put in charge of the investigation and tries to steer it first one way, then another and then finally to point to himself. As we discover early on, despite the sex-and-murder games he and the victim used to play and despite his admitted arousal around murder scenes, this crime is less a thrill-kill than a icily premeditated, semi-scientific inquiry into whether he is just as untouchable as he believes he is. Its closest kin in this regard might be Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Rope,” but where in that film the eradication of that particular victim was the point, here the murder is merely the vehicle by which the inspector gets to test his hypothesis. It is not subtle: Petri shoots Volonte delivering a speech equating homosexuals with terrorists as if he’s Mussolini addressing a rally. The nervy editing and jauntily abrasive Ennio Morricone score add to the unease, and it all combines to make ‘Investigation’ one of the most emotive of neo-noirs —the emotion is fury, and it is Petri’s at the grotesque corruption and cronyism he sees as endemic to Italian society.