Breathless (1960)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
24 connections found
View:
24 films that influenced Breathless
What critics say influenced Breathless
Though the plot mechanics of Breathless are as old as Scarface--one of the many touchstone films mentioned in Godard's irreverent trailer for the movie, and George Raft's quarter-flipping is likely the inspiration for Belmondo's tic-like ritual of rubbing his lips--but the upstart director busts all of the boundaries off the genre and flaunts the rules of moviemaking to boot.
He would later joke that he thought he was making "Scarface" (meaning the 1932 Howard Hawks film) and only found out later that he was making "Alice in Wonderland."
Michel is an amoral chancer who consciously styles himself after Bogart, while the film itself is in part a homage to Hollywood film noir, making a particular nod to Joseph H Lewis's seminal love-on-the-run movie Gun Crazy.
Monogram was originally the distributor-of-choice for Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy, the spiritual step-sister of Breathless a decade earlier.
Therefore, “Breathless” is a film suffused with films--it opens with a dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio of the time and contains references to such movies as “The Harder They Fall” (best known for being the last screen appearance of Humphrey Bogart), “Westbound,” “Whirlpool” and homages to the works of such American filmmakers as Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann.
Lifting his defining gesture of rubbing his thumb across his lips from Humphrey Bogart in "The Harder They Fall," Michel has tailor-made for himself an identity collaged from Hollywood myth.
With an homage to Bogie and an ending ripped from the final seconds of Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra , Godard simultaneously salutes Hollywood and gives it the finger: Says longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard in a new doc, the director made a purposely rebellious movie, using a handheld camera, natural light, a wheelchair for dolly shots, and, most famously, the influential and now-ubiquitous jump cuts.
Advertisement
"Breathless" is, along with Orson Welles 's " Citizen Kane ," the movie that has most influenced other movie- makers.
No debut film since " Citizen Kane " in 1942 has been as influential.
No debut film since Citizen Kane has been as influential."
The subject of rapturous praise, often hailed as the greatest debut film since "Citizen Kane," it continues to lure us back, tempting us to disentangle the movie from the myth.
In many ways, Michel is as much a poor sap as Robert Mitchum’s Jeff from 1947’s “Out of the Past”, only Michel doesn’t have a promising new life he can turn to like Jeff did.
Breathless movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a French thug and Jean Seberg as the American dame who leads him to his doom – a motif (minus the nationality specifics) found in Hollywood films noirs like Double Indemnity , Out of the Past , and Angel Face .
Jump cuts have been around as long as film – being used as a special effect as early as George Melies’ A Trip To The Moon in 1902 – but never before had it been used to cut through time within dialogue scenes.
When Patricia rolls up her poster of a Renoir painting (itself a once-removed cinema reference) and looks at Michel through this makeshift "viewfinder", Godard is pilfering the unusual POV shot, intact and clear as day, from Samuel Fuller's "Forty Guns".
Advertisement
Movie posters and marquees are ubiquitous in the film: Jeff Chandler and Jack Palance in "Ten Seconds In Hell"; the recently-opened "Hiroshima Mon Amour"; and a movie theater playing a Western that Michel and Patricia use as cover when the police net closes in.
Burt Lancaster, be it in Criss Cross or The Killers, was never able to shake off the inevitability of fate.