Jean-Pierre Melville

He was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach; Melville was the working name, and the American accent it carries is the right clue to the influences. His first feature, The Silence of the Sea, appeared in 1949, made outside the French industry's approved channels, and independence remained the whole method: he ran his own studio and kept his own schedule at a time when almost nobody in France did. The New Wave that arrived a decade later treated him as a godfather, and Breathless in 1960 gave him a cameo as the novelist Parvulesco, handing out epigrams to a journalist.

What he did to the crime film was subtract. Le Samourai opens on a man lying on a bed in a bare rented room with a caged bird, and simply holds there; dialogue can wait. His gangsters are professionals defined by procedure, by hats and trench coats and a code nobody bothers to explain because everyone in the room already knows it. The heist at the centre of Le Cercle Rouge runs at length and almost entirely without speech. Bob le Flambeur, made earlier and looser, is the warmest of them and the closest he came to open affection for his crooks.

The war films sit apart and may be the stronger half. The Silence of the Sea is an occupation chamber piece built on a refusal to speak. Army of Shadows, from 1969, is a Resistance film with no heroics in it whatsoever, only logistics, fear and the arithmetic of what the work costs. Leon Morin, Priest shows he could sustain a two-hander about faith and desire with no gun in the frame at all.

He worked until 1973, the year he died, and the crime cinema that came after has been quoting him ever since.