Jean-Pierre Melville: Who does that for anyone?

The ruins of Studio Jenner, June 30th, 1967.
"... Yet [Jean-Pierre] Melville did not merely lift the name, he made it his own. In his 13 films, Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often death. Paris is usually their home, and it’s depicted as if it were always night, a city of slick cabarets, backroom poker games and garages where you can get a makeover for a newly stolen car – or a gun. In their fleeting appearances, even the city’s monuments acquire a desolate air. In the words of the director Philippe Labro, Melville’s films are suffused with ‘solitude, violence, mystery, a passion for risk and the aftertaste of the unpredictable and the inevitable’. Melville was a loner and a curmudgeon, with more than a touch of Bartleby. ..."
London Review of Books
[PDF] One Hundred Years Of Jean-Pierre Melville
Cinemois by Jean Pierre Melville
Guardian - Jean-Pierre Melville: cinematic poet of the lowlife and criminal
Movie Poster of the Week: Jean-Pierre Melville in Posters
W - Magnet of Doom, Surrender to the Void, Criterion ($), YouTube: L'aîné des Ferchaux

2015 January: Le Cercle Rouge (1970), 2017 June: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Cinema of Resistance, 2017 November: Un Flic (1972), 2018 November: Two Men in Manhattan (1959)