In the restaurant section of the weekly Parisian tourist guide, Pariscope, there is a class of restaurant defined as hors-catégorie (“uncategorisable”) which denotes the dozen or so very finest gastronomic establishments – Lucas-Carton, La Tour d’Argent, Lasserre etc. Jean-Pierre Melville is the one post-war French filmmaker who could be described as hors-categorie. He belonged to no movement or group, operating between 1950 and 1970 as a sort of lone gunman in the industry, with no contemporaries either inviting or deserving of comparison.

He occupies a unique position in French Cinema, partly in that his films are inspired almost entirely by American film noir but principally because he created a singular style of brutal minimalism which ran counter to every instinct present in French Cinema before or since. The Nouvelle Vague troika of Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, who borrowed Melville’s occasional habit of “reportage-style” shooting for their early films, were far too self-conscious about their need to make artistic statements to ever come close to matching the stripped-down, fatalistic brilliance of Melville’s best work.

Apart from his resistance drama l’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) which on its re-release by the BFI a couple of years ago, promptly gatecrashed most major film critics’ Top Ten Films of 2006, almost all of Melville’s films deal with organised crime and in particular, heists. The depth Melville brings to these tightly-crafted genre pieces resides in the almost unbearable sense of restraint which pervades both the acting and cinematography. The actors internalise all emotion, speaking only when and to the extent that it is absolutely necessary to do so. The effect is deliberate and almost theatrical, but the action, when it comes, has twice the impact. The world he portrays is all the more powerful for what you do not see and hear than for what you do.

Few if any filmmakers in the crime-thriller genre have shown this same understanding of Cinema’s power to take the audience to a place and to keep them wondering what is happening and what will happen. By remarkable coincidence, the recent Cannes prizewinner: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) provides what must be one of the strongest of modern examples of this. It is almost as if the audience is exhorted to feel the emotion that the actors will not display.

Those modern filmmakers who have discovered and loved Melville, in particular Walter Hill, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Hong Kong directors Ringo Lam and John Woo, manifest an obsessive need to pay homage through their work. Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is a devotional treatment of Melville’s existentialist masterpiece Le Samouraï (1967) a film which defined the brooding intensity of its star, Alain Delon. To borrow a football term, Melville was also a set-piece specialist, hence the existence of at least half a dozen contenders in his work for the title of SMIC.

It is almost be impossible to avoid the word ‘cool’ when describing Melville’s films, so I will not try. Yes, they are ‘cool’ (until something else is considered cool), but they are worth discovering because they are so much more. I’ve chosen a scene from his most famous film, Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in which the character of Corey (Alain Delon) having just been released from prison, has burgled the personal safe of the Marseille drug baron who put him there. He seeks late night recreation in a billiards club.