Sightlines · reception
How The Strange Ones was received
1950 · Jean-Pierre Melville · The Strange Ones on Sightlines
The arc
Released to modest attention in 1950 and long overshadowed by the question of whose film it really was, it's now firmly canonized — a Criterion-anointed classic seen as a bridge between Cocteau's poetic cinema and the coming French New Wave.
What’s debated
The eternal cinephile debate: is this a Jean-Pierre Melville film or a Jean Cocteau film — the director's craft versus the author's voice, narration, and casting fingerprints all over it?
Its footprint
Its hothouse world of siblings sealed in a shared room echoes through later cinema, most famously in Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), which openly channels Cocteau's enfants terribles.
Where it stands
A cinephile rite of passage — the 'strange one' in Melville's own filmography, beloved by fans who know him for trench-coat crime pictures and are startled to find him doing fevered Cocteau chamber drama.
Did you know? Cocteau didn't just write the source novel — he narrates the film himself, and he insisted on casting his protégé Édouard Dermithe as Paul over Melville's objections, one of several tugs-of-war between the two men during production.