Home

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973)

Alias:
Jean-Pierre Grumbach
让-皮埃尔·梅尔维尔
장 피에르 멜빌
장-피에르 멜빌
장피에르 멜빌

Birthplace:
Paris, France

Born:
October 20, 1917

Died:
August 2, 1973

Biography from TheMovieDB

Jean-Pierre Grumbach (20 October 1917 – 2 August 1973), known professionally as Jean-Pierre Melville (French: [mɛlvil]), was a French filmmaker. Considered a spiritual father of the French New Wave, he was one of the first fully-independent French filmmakers to achieve commercial and critical success. His works include the crime dramas Bob le flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), and the war films Le Silence de la mer (1949) and Army of Shadows (1969).  Melville's subject matter and approach to filmmaking was heavily influenced by his service in the French Resistance during World War II, during which he adopted the pseudonym 'Melville' as a tribute to his favorite American author Herman Melville. He kept it as his stage name once the war was over.  His sparse, existentialist but stylish approach to film noir and later neo-noir films, many of them in the crime dramas, have been highly influential to future generations of filmmakers. Roger Ebert appraised him as "one of the greatest directors."  Description above from the Wikipedia article Jean-Pierre Melville, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Film Performances

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

Film Production

Adaptation:
1949  The Silence of the Sea

Dialogue:
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1963  Magnet of Doom

Director:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films

Editor:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films

Executive Producer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films

Original Film Writer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Producer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Production Design:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2004  Their First Films
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Screenplay:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
2003  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Thanks:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
1999  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
2003  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2018  Thlípsi
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Writer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  Les Enfants Terribles
1953  When You Read This Letter
1956  Bob le Flambeur
1959  Two Men in Manhattan
1961  Léon Morin, Priest
1962  Le Doulos
1963  Magnet of Doom
1966  Le Deuxième Souffle
1967  Le Samouraï
1969  Army of Shadows
1970  Le Cercle Rouge
1972  Un Flic
1999  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
2003  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2018  Thlípsi
2021  Le Cercle rouge

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

TV Performances

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.