Like Point Blank and Bonnie & Clyde, Le Samourai is impossible to imagine without the influence of six decades of crime movies. It's the work of a French director, Jean-Pierre Mel-ville, who grew up feasting on American pulp thrillers and glossy Hollywood dramas, which fueled his themes of loyalty, betrayal, and codes of honor and conduct among the criminal classes. And yet it's an amazing, one-of-a-kind movie--a slow, fanciful, ruminative character study seething with thuggish cool--that has led to some of the most over-the-top action movies of recent years.

If you go expecting the slam-bang bloodshed of the movies it inspired--chiefly Reservoir Dogs and The Killer--you'll probably fall asleep. (This influence is probably what got the movie rereleased.) But if you love movies that change the way you see the world, that plant you in another person's consciousness for two hours, that allow you to pretend you're stalking the streets of Paris with steel-blue eyes and killer reflexes, you'll want to tell every hardcore movie nut you know about it--which I pretty much spent the weekend doing.

Le Samourai opens with a great, unsettling shot of a big empty hotel room with a solitary figure laid out on the bed, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Using a famous trick employed by Hitchcock and countless other suspense directors, the camera simultaneously pulls backward and zooms forward, creating a disorienting warp in perspective--but cinematographer Henri Decae (The 400 Blows) staggers the zoom effect, making the room seem to bow and bend. That's how it feels to be master assassin Jef Costello, a cold-blooded loner whose sole companion is a bullfinch that chirps at the sign of danger (a neat touch). Alain Delon, his face as pale and impassive as a Kabuki mask, plays Jef; he was cast as much for his suave, blank pretty-boy looks as for his ability to look debauched and haunted all at once.

The movie follows Jef as his latest assignment turns into a nightmare of police lineups, constant surveillance, and double-crosses that must be repaid in blood. The police press his casual lover (Nathalie Delon) to rat him out; a mysterious cabaret singer (Caty Rosier) refuses to finger him, which is suspicious in itself. It dawns on him, and on us, that he has fulfilled his last contract. Nevertheless, he accepts one more job--one whose target, he learns, is much closer to home. He refuses to back out. He has, after all, accepted the money.

Jean-Pierre Melville (n Grumbach; he adopted the name of his favorite author) was a flamboyant tough guy and lifelong movie buff who fought in the French Resistance during World War II. His wartime experiences, like Samuel Fuller's, shaped a view of the world best expressed in tough, gut-level crime-dramas. (His fast, economical methods of working were an inspiration to the young Truffaut and Godard, the latter of whom cast the veteran director in a great cameo in Breathless.) Melville even dressed the part. He favored wide-belted Sam Spade trench coats, and he adopted a brash Stetson as his trademark.

It is no surprise, then, that he would understand the allure of gangster chic so well. His 1955 noir drama Bob le Flambeur unfolds in a kid's dress-up dream of a criminal underworld, and Melville loses himself so completely in its ambience that he doesn't even fool with the rat-a-tat requirements of action filmmaking. He's happy just to tag along with his fatalistic hero, savoring the streets and the feeling of owning them.

Le Samourai, made 12 years later, is even more refined. Every movement has the heaviness of ritual. Crime is a formalized repetition of behavior: Jef performs every criminal act in the movie at least twice, in exactly the same methodical way, whether it's stealing a car with a ring of skeleton keys or acquiring a new set of plates. When Jef dons his fedora before leaving for a hit, he rubs his thumb along the brim as if he were crossing himself--a gunslinger's rite of preparation. This isn't just a killer's natural caution, though; it's an acknowledgment of how much we movie junkies crave the conventions of gangster flicks. So potent is the gangster iconography that Melville sometimes obscures Jef's face completely. He knows the cocked hat and trench coat have power all by themselves.

Just business Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le Samourai

Delon looks so perfect and moves with such stealth that the director follows him as if in a wish-fulfillment reverie. If you took out every scene of Jef stalking the city streets, the movie would be an hour shorter. But it wouldn't have its bizarre, unique mood of moving constantly without going anywhere, the mood captured in the very first shot. And it wouldn't have its overwhelming sense of place. We're always aware of city life at its different levels, in every sense of the word. The action takes place in apartments, on the street, and underground, sometimes simultaneously, and there's a strong sense of criminals, civilians, and police coexisting uneasily in the same world. As lit by Decae, that world is all hard, matte-finish surfaces, as cold and grayish-blue as gunmetal. Even the glass interior of the nightclub seems confining--part prism, part prison.

There are plenty of cool assassin movies, many of them influenced by this one. But Le Samourai imagines more vividly than any other what it would be like to stand in a killer's shoes--not just during bursts of violence, but throughout every agonizing second of existential dread, insecurity, and elation. The movie's glacial pace makes you feel the weight of Jef's every small decision--which is appropriate, since his life rides on every one. It's easy to see why generations of movie fanatics, from the Nouvelle Vogue to Martin Scorsese to John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, fell in love with the icy glamour of Jean-Pierre Melville's movie-fed fantasies of underworld life. To see Le Samourai on a big screen is to remember pointing toy guns as a kid and reenacting scenes from the late show--only with Melville's adult awareness that the stuff of cinematic fantasy draws real blood.