Le Doulos

Jean-Pierre Melville's cool, often cruel 1962 classic "Le Doulos" stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a smiling underworld informer, charming and disarming one minute, cunning and sadistically violent the next. Melville's skewed morality tale is a ruthless riff on the criminal code and the chaos that erupts whenever it's betrayed. Not all of the niggling little details add up, but they create a savagely murky moral center in this black-and-white fantasy of cops and crooks and elegant living on the edge of destruction, where male friendship trumps romance and loyalty tops all. Criterion also releases Melville's much rarer "Le Deuxième Souffle," a meticulously plotted and crisply executed crime thriller that opens with a prison break and ends on a mission of revenge. Lino Ventura stars. Both discs feature commentary, new and archival interviews, the original trailer, and a booklet with an original essay.