Jean-Pierre Melville's coolly minimalist French crime classic stars Alain Delon as a solitary, trench-coated contract killer whose meticulous professionalism unravels after a nightclub hit leaves a witness and the police closing in. Spare, elegant and almost silent, it distills the hitman archetype to its purest, most iconic form. Enormously influential on filmmakers from John Woo to Jim Jarmusch, it's a landmark of existential cool.