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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.

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Additional information:

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Film Performances

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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  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films

Editor:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films

Executive Producer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films

Original Film Writer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

Producer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

Production Design:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2004  Their First Films
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

Screenplay:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
2002  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

Thanks:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
1999  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
2002  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2018  Thlípsi
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

Writer:
1946  24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
1949  The Silence of the Sea
1950  The Strange Ones
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  A Cop
1999  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
2002  The Good Thief
2004  Their First Films
2018  Thlípsi
2021  Short Cuts : Le Cercle rouge de Jean-Pierre Melville

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TV Performances

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About the Movie Section

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

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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).

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