Jean-Pierre Melville Collection

Born in Paris during WW1, he was to become a member of the French resistance in the Second World War, an experience which he drew on in his later career as a film director, routinely plunging his characters into an underworld of secrecy and deception. The reluctant godfather of the French New Wave, Melville's highly individual style was influenced by the ideas of existentialism and surrealism, but arguably his greatest debt was to classical American cinema, the traditions of which he wove with inimitable style into his quintessentially French films. Hailed by many as the father of the French gangster movie, he was inspired by the classic film noirs of 1930s and 40s Hollywood, imbuing many his films with a sense of menace and impending peril, creating a sinister underworld to be traversed by his ubiquitous gun-toting hoodlums. This set contains six of his finest films, from his early bittersweet masterpiece, Bob Le Flambeur, to his final film, Un flic, his wonderfully fatalistic study of loss and deception; a fitting epitaph to one of the finest careers in contemporary cinema.