Talk:Le Samouraï

Joan McLeod novel "The Ronin" as basis for movie
I've looked everywhere from Amazon and Alibris to the Library of Congress and Google, and the only mention I can find of the Joan McLeod novel is in reference to this movie - it simply does not exist in the book catalogs I checked. I am beginning to think that all of the references to this book being the uncredited source for the movie are derived from a single IMDB entry, and that that entry may be in error.

Can anyone confirm that there is a novel called 'The Ronin' by McLeod that came out before this movie? Perhaps it was a foreign language title that was cited in an English-language interview with the director, and either the title or the author name got mangled in the process? --Zippy 23:25, 22 March 2007 (UTC)


 * If you get the Criterion Collection DVD release of it, maybe it'll be there. I have no idea, still. --h_a 11:12, 29 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I searched for the novel as well. I can't find a trace of the author, or her book. None whatsoever. I tried 'Joan MacLeod' (which yielded more results) and 'Jean McLeod' (no success), and still no trace of the actual novel. The earliest mention I can find about the novel is 1972; an article about Le Samurai and it doesn't cite a source either. I checked every director Jean-Pierre Melville interview I could possibly find, and he didn't mention nor discuss the source of his film. I'll have to get Melville on Melville, edited by Rui Nogueira and translated by Tom Milne (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), to see if the director said anything about it. Argh. Frustrating. 0zero9nine (talk) 18:59, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

The novel is mentioned in Variety's 1967 review of the original film screened in Paris. Melville "uses an American book [by Joan McLeod] on a hired killer and transposes it to Paris." Plummer (talk) 03:42, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 04:39, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Review
This article reads more like a movie review or an essay from a film class than an encyclopedic entry. Lack of citations and phrasing such as "three or so" only compound the problem. This really needs change. Aaeamdar (talk) 02:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

After reading the introductory paragraph at the beginning, I think the last two sentences need rewording. They don't really make much sense, but I can't find how to edit them myself. 20 October 2014. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qjmccall (talk • contribs) 23:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Removing a reference of Joan McLeod's novel from Infobox
In Le Samouraï's infobox, it states that this French film is based on "Joan McLeod's novel The Ronin (uncredited)". Because it's uncredited, I thought it was necessary to find a citation that officially confirms the link. As it turns out, the novel doesn't exist. I checked every source that catalogues books in every possible language and found that each has no record of Joan McLeod's The Ronin.

I thought perhaps it was an unpublished manuscript, so I checked books and essays about the film and the director, and almost all just state "Joan McLeod's novel The Ronin" while citing other film books as sources. The earliest mention I could find is in an AFI (American Film Institute) article, published in 1972, and it doesn't cite a source. I checked French sources and the early works don't mention the author and the novel while the later works do, citing film books as sources. I think film authors and journalists relied on each other without actually checking whether the novel even exists.

I checked variations of the author's name: Jean McLeod, Joan MacLeod and Joan McCloud. No luck. Screenwriter Georges Pellegrin, writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville and producers Raymond Borderie and Eugène Lépicier are unfortunately dead, but none of them had directly mentioned Joan McLeod or/and the novel in any interviews (French, English and Japanese). Actor Alain Delon, who starred in this film, is still alive, so I got in touch with his management agency. His publicist replied that Mr. Delon doesn't recall mentions of the novel during pre-production and the filming. In fact, he apparently didn't realise it was based on the novel (obviously, I can't use this as a source as it's way too informal.)

As far as I can tell, the novel and its author don't exist. Not in the records at the Congress of Library (US) and the British Library, not in the World Catalogue Index, and not in any usual copyright databases. Yet it's mentioned in well over 40 film books and essays since 1972; all with no mention of publisher and year of publishing, and the majority cites each other.

With all that in mind, I'm removing the reference to this alleged novel from the film's Info box. That's unless someone could provide the publishing details of the novel or a citable proof of screenwriter Georges Pellegrin, writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville or producers Raymond Borderie and Eugène Lépicier acknowledging the novel as the basis of this film. 0zero9nine (talk) 17:18, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Plot shortened
I have condensed the plot summary by a good one third and removed the "too long or excessively detailed" banner from the top. Sorry about the large number of individual edits but I think the end result is what counts. Greetings from Germany. 22 December 2012

Analogy with Jarmush's movie Ghost Dog
It seems to me the pigeons Forrest Whithaker uses in Ghost doc are allusive to the bird Alain Delon breeds in his case. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.52.62.182 (talk) 21:31, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

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