Hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) lies smoking in his austere, gray, drabby little appartement, its only other occupant, a caged parakeet. The shot holds on the room steady with the only movement the smoke in the room.
He goes outside. It's raining. Police are checking parking. He waits, just another man in a raincoat in the rain. Then, a Citroen DS pulls up nearby and parks, its owner leaves. Jef goes over to it and gets in, pulls out a wire with 100's of keys on it, and then methodically tries each one. The fourth key works (good thing because the parking cops are approaching), and he leaves, turning into a rural garage where the plates are changed while he waits—smoking—and he is given a gun, which he glances at to make sure it's loaded and with a wrist-flip, snaps the cylinder into place. He's ready for the job...but not yet for after the job.
Before his appointment, he makes two stops: he goes to the apartment of his lover, Jane (Natalie Delon) and tells her that he will have been there from 7:15 pm to 2:15 am—that won't do (her other lover shows up at 2 am) so they change the fictional rendezvous from 7:15 pm to 1:45 am; he visits a back-street poker game and watches for awhile. He asks how long they'll be playing and it's an all-night affair. He says he'll be back and advised to bring cash in case he loses.
And then, the shot wobbles in a slight Vertigo zoom, moves forward and back, almost sickeningly, like an internal alarm clock.
When it stops, Jef rises, puts on his ritualistic 40's tough-guy costume of a trench coat and fedora and goes to work. The lay of his hat-brim is perfect.
That's when he tells the guy he never loses.
"Not really."
Le Samouraï is a gangster movie with no gangsters, and thus, no camaraderie, no boasting and little ego displayed. There is "code" of a sorts, but no loyalty. The job Jef does is tough enough that emotions just get in the way. Jane likes Jef because "you need me"—there's a hole in his soul that she fulfills. He is (as they say in The Godfather) "as cold as they come". Indeed, throughout the entire movie Jef shows no emotion, speaks little, and gives nothing away. He betrays nothing. Not really.
Melville's film has a lot of details, but it's a movie as spare in its exposition as a Hemingway story, depending on the visuals to tell the story, especially considering its protagonist is a man of few words and expressions. But, he is a man of habit—like not talking to a man holding a gun on him—and ritual, and those are better shown rather than explained. It's a great directorial strategy for a hit-man—you follow his silent movements (he is antithetically easy to pick out in a crowd) as he stalks his territory in a world that is not a black-and-white noir, but an almost stringently gray one. You watch what he does, not what he says, and, even then, the words may just distract or provide an opportunity for his next actions.
This particular job is to kill the owner of a nightclub—Montey's—and he'll add latex gloves to his apparel to leave no trace, just an impression, and then toss the gloves and gun into the Seine, leave the car out on an anonymous street, one of dozens of Citroens, and disappear into the night, all evidence scattered, untraceable to him, then back to his girlfriends' so he can be noticed leaving at the proper time, and back to the poker game. After those details are taken care of, it's back to his inconspicuous apartment to wait payment...and the next job. Why this particular "hit" is not his concern and not his pay-grade. Do the deed and get away clean enough to get paid.
That's the tricky part. You can't kill somebody without somebody noticing, and when you kill somebody, the police get annoyed. Within the hour, its superintendent—he doesn't even get a name—(Françoise Périer), knowing time is not on his side, puts out a bulletin to "round up the usual suspects" meeting the vague description "tall, young, raincoat, hat" (he wants 20 suspects from each district and with that description 400 suspects for a line-up should be easy to find). One of those pulled in is Jef—from the poker game—and he does stand out from the more contemporaneously dressed riff-raff. The superintendent ("I don't think") does methodic line-ups with the witnesses—the jazz-pianist (Caty Rosier) who ran into Jeff in the hall-way after the kill and a hat-check girl, who didn't really see him, a guest, and bartender and a couple others. Le Commissaire suspects Jef among all of them, but when the two best witnesses take a good look at them, neither of them says he's the man—not even the piano-player, who clearly saw his face.
Why? It's a question Jef ponders as much as the audience. He should be dead to rights identified as the hit-man, but the piano player deliberately says he wasn't the one she saw. A lucky break, and given the careful way that Jef has set up his alibis—and as no one has to lie, really—he even has the psychological angle covered when Jane's lover, who saw him outside her apartment, lies to incriminate his rival, a move that doesn't hold up under police scrutiny.
But, the girl...? What is her motivation to lie for Jef. That becomes the enigma of the story and sets the movie to lean into its Japanese-tinted title, despite its French origins. He has two reasons that come to mind: either she's messing with the police, or she was told not to recognize him (it never enters his mind that she might have done it out of the goodness of her heart—but why?). Clearly, he owes her, and as he travels his next few steps, he wants to make the connection why. It might be important later.
So, the police set up elaborate plans to track him...tails, bugging his apartment, harassing Jane to admit she's covering for him...while he goes off to get the rest of his payment. A quick feint on the Metro loses his shadow, letting him meet the go-between on an overpass. But, before they can exchange terms, the guy pulls a gun, grazing Jef's arm before he gets knocked down and disarmed. This isn't good news—he's being chased by the cops and his employers. He gets back to his apartment and bandages himself up. The parakeet acts like a canary in a coal mine, letting him know that somebody's been in his apartment—he'll need that later—and he finds the listening device and disables it. The next step is to find the guys who hired him and why they want to kill him. He won't have to look for long.
Same for the director. The movie starts with a quote over that steady opening shot of his apartment: "There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps..."
Perhaps. But, the quote is entirely fictional, created by Melville for the movie.
And perhaps, Jef's remark that "I never lose" is just wishful thinking. And his "Not really" is his more honest disclamation of it.
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