Le Deuxième Souffle was, when it was released in Europe in 1966, the last film to be shot by Jean-Pierre Melville in black-and-white. The French master's first color film was Le Samourai in 1967 and was followed within two years by Army of Shadows, two inarguable masterpieces that the US wanted nothing to do with at the time. Like few other directors, Melville took naturally to color, uncovering a deeper isolation in an array of tones that had seemed simply tragic in his peerless black-and-white work. Recently remade in France with Daniel Auteuil in the lead, Le Deuxième Souffle, which literally translates into "The Second Breath," might be considered "minor" Melville in comparison to the towering giants that followed it, but even that would rank it among the best crim films of the 1960s.

Staging a prison break before the credits even start, Gustave (Lino Ventura, the epitome of glacier cool), constantly referred to as Gu, quickly finds his way to a Paris safe house as he begins to plan a way to get to Marseilles with his girlfriend Manouche (Christine Fabréga) and enough dough to retire from the underworld. It's not long before he's giving up his desire to kill local hood Jo Ricci (expert sniveler Marcel Bozzuffi) instead planning to rob a police transport with Ricci's brother Paul (Raymond Pellegrin). The take is nearly a billion dollars worth of platinum bars, though it will mean working with hot-tempered upstart Antoine Ripa (Denis Manuel).

The late '60s were a tumultuous time for Melville as far as support and praise were concerned. A notorious right-winger, the godfather of the nouvelle vague now found his disciples at the Cahiers du Cinema turning against him as filmmaking took a decidedly politicized turn away from hard-nosed, American-influenced storytelling and towards more structurally boundless and fractured terrain. Five years prior to Souffle, Melville had been asked by a friend and colleague to act and consult on one young director's debut. Perhaps not everyone catches Melville as the blowhard interviewee in Godard's Breathless, but it was a seminal moment of baton-passing: A film indebted to its forebears and a prognosticator of a new cinematic era.

Dutifully, Deuxième Souffle is perhaps Melville's most elementally structuralist affair. The acting is superbly restrained, the movement and space mapped meticulously. It is perhaps the most fluidly edited of the master's films. In this respect, though, it is thoroughly apolitical, the film foresees the globe-trotting paranoia of Army of Shadows and the director's late-era crime epic Le Circle Rouge rather than representing the penultimate work of Melville's black-and-white period.

Few things in Melville's oeuvre rival the centerpiece heist of the police transport, executed with the precision of a Swiss stopwatch. Bernard Gérard's unhinged jazz accompaniment is suspended while Melville focuses on procedure and movement, ingratiating the scene with the permanence of the hold-ups and shoot-outs of Ford and Hawks. Like those two directors saw the myth of America in their westerns, Melville sees the cold efficiency of the French bourgeoisie in his teeming underworld, two worlds he often remarked as being nearly one and the same.

Of all the gangsters, thieves and hoodlums that populate Le Deuxième Souffle, few have the presence that Pierre Zimmer gave the properly-named Orloff, a gigantic, reserved gangster who passes the heist to his old friend Gu and remains one of the few people who sticks with the aging thief when he accidently rats on Paul. Possessed of nearly the same frosty manner as Ventura, Zimmer dominates his scenes with stiff physicality and a collected expression, especially in a nerve-wracking sequence where he looks to be cornered by Jo and Antoine. That this was Zimmer's debut performance renders it near-astonishing.

Not many of Melville's crime sonatas end happily and Souffle is no exception. Tracked by a corrupt police force, Gu ends up stuck between Jo Ricci and his thugs and Commissar Blot (the great Paul Meurisse), the investigator who has been following him throughout. Like the doomed samourai that he so often filmed, Melville became increasingly fatalistic while approaching his 55th birthday, seeing as both his father and grandfather had suffered fatal heart attacks in their 55th year. Eerily, he suffered the same fate only two months before his 56th birthday in 1973, a year after releasing his swan song, Un Flic, in France and two years before it would see release stateside. Like Gu, there is a sense he saw his fate coming and, rather than let his reputation succumb to uneasy modernity, simply said "To hell with it!" and continued to make brilliant, tight-lipped noirs like this.