Melville was a king of style, his best films usually tales of gangsters who are looking for a portal back to the Hollywood movies they fell out of. Leon Morin, Priest, though, is the middle of a trilogy of movies in which Melville tried to capture the experience of France during World War II, a time when Melville himself had been soldier in the Resistance -- the first, The Silence of the Sea, was his first feature as director, the third, Army of Shadows, is his most epic masterpiece, the film where he was able to bring together all of his interests, passions, and proclivities, giving them a depth and resonance they'd not quite had before.
Leon Morin was originally going to be more epic than it is, but part of Melville's goal in making it was to create a more commercial and popular movie than he had before, and so he sacrificed as much as he could bear to that goal. His first cut ran about three hours, whereas the new U.S. edition from Criterion runs 117 minutes. What Melville reportedly cut -- and this is supported by the two (tantalizingly short) deleted scenes included on the Criterion disc -- was a lot of material about everyday life in France during the Nazi occupation. The released version of the film focuses primarily on the protagonist, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), and the object of her fascination, the priest Leon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Traces of the cut scenes haunt the film in a few anomalous and inexplicable moments, but these contribute to the overall feeling of the occupation's remote terror, like the sounds of tanks and gunshots just beyond Barny's window at night. Mostly, this is a movie about Barny's loneliness and the emotional perils that loneliness brings her to.
