Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born in Paris in 1917 to Alsatian Jewish parents, Berthe and Jules Grumbach. He took the name Melville from the author of Moby-Dick. He was one of the first fully independent French filmmakers to succeed both commercially and critically, and is considered the spiritual godfather of the New Wave; Godard cast him in Breathless. His crime films — Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge — created the cool, silent style that Scorsese, Tarantino, Woo and Mann all took from. Le Silence de la mer and Army of Shadows come from what he had lived himself in the Resistance.