With his distinctive air of hopelessness

and his uncompromising vision of rubble-strewn Paris, Melville was aptly like the directorial equivalent of his leading characters; sardonic loners who obstinately refused to compromise. Beginning his career in the late 1940s, Melville was too old to ride the French New Wave that took off a decade later, spearheaded by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Yet neither was he part of the earlier movements of the Tradition de la qualité (the older mode of French cinema) seen in films by the likes of Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné.