JULIE LONDON

It is the birthday today of one of my favorite singers, Julie London, who died, you will recall, seven years ago. In addition to being a wonderful stylist, with a nuanced, smokily crystalline, delicately whisky voice, London had beautiful bone structure. Alas, she was a terrible actress!

She was married to Jack Webb and jazz musician Bobby Troup. Julie had children with Webb, but it’s her long-running musical partnership with Bobby that we remember.

In daylight London wasn’t particularly striking; but it’s only in bad movies that we saw her in daylight. When we think of Julie, we think of her sultry presence in the underlit setting of an intimate club. There, she was one of the most beautiful women on earth—or, rather, somewhere apart from earth.

Cry me a river, Julie; cry me a river whenever you want.

UN FLIC (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Usually the heist or robbery doesn’t arrive until the climax, and it unfolds after-hours in near silence in the city. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s A Cop, the bank robbery in a western French coastal town opens the film in waning daylight as a storm rages. Inside the bank, robbers don sunglasses as the crashing sound of sea outdoors distracts our attention, making the robbers seem all that more alien in their concentration. One of them, wounded, will be dispatched in hospital by his compatriots, through the agency of their leader Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy, dressed as a nurse: an image of mercy committing cold-blooded murder. Cathy is also in bed with Edouard, the Parisian police chief. At one point Edouard also dons sunglasses. He is brutal, cynical; he brusquely beats the arrested and holds in complicated bondage a transvestite informant who aches for freedom. The world is morally ambiguous, and Coleman’s coldness and cruelty recall both authorities and the underground Resistance during the Occupation.
     Many decry that Melville’s last film wasn’t one of his masterpieces; but it’s a summary work that closes a phenomenal body of work.
     Alain Delon is brilliant as Edouard, a man so coolly monstrous that when he opens a bathroom door to apprehend a criminal he instantly closes it to give the man a second longer to complete his suicide, thus saving the state (and himself) time and trouble. Needless to say, his motives are muddied when he finally has his quick-trigger showdown in the street with Simon as Cathy watches. Simon, it turns out, is unarmed: murder passing for suicide, and suicide masking police business-as-usual. But Simon’s motive in inviting death is to protect Cathy; before he takes to the street, Simon is shown against the Arc de Triomphe outside his window.