Review of Léon Morin, Priest (1961) by Charles P — 28 Jul 2011

The first of three consecutive Melville films to feature newly minted superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead, here playing a good looking country priest who takes the confessions, and intellectual conversations of sexually repressed and psychologically frustrated women during the Occupation, but finds a tough sell in atheist, communist widow Emmanuelle Riva.

Melville takes Beatrix Beck's novel, about the yearnings of the woman for the handsome priest, and turns it into a symbolic story where the intellectual conversations between Morin and his flock are as much a form of sanity and resistance during the Occupation as was the silence between the niece and the â??good Germanâ?? in â??Le Silence de la merâ??, but where the former was marked by expressionistic lighting and the restrictions of budget and location, here Melville, working primarily out of his Rue Jenner studio, takes pains to construct a mise-en-scene, through experimental editing and classical framing, that neither enhances, or devalues Morin's superiority over the women.

It's a fine example of Melville's continuing, expanding dictatorial directing style.