Melville has been explicit that Rififi is the film the French heist picture is measured against, and Le Cercle rouge answers it with the same central device. The jewellery robbery in the Place Vendome runs for roughly half an hour in near silence, with no dialogue and almost no score, which is the formal constraint Dassin invented in 1955 and which nobody had attempted at that length since. The rest is Melville's own: the fatalism, the raincoats, the professional courtesy between the police and the men they are hunting. What comes from Rififi is the proposition that the most gripping thing you can put on a screen is competent men working quietly.