A while back rumors began to fly that Hong Kong's Johnnie To was getting ready to shoot a movie with that icon of French cinema, Alain Delon. It turned out the rumors were true. It was a long-simmering project, but the script by Wai Ka-fai was supposedly terrific and To and Delon had met and liked each other and wanted to work together. The basic story was that an aging French gangster, now retired, came to Hong Kong to avenge the death of his daughter who had married a Chinese guy and been murdered when his family, who happened to be criminals, were wiped out. It sounds pretty straightforward except for one twist that I'm not giving away because who wants to the be the guy who spoils Christmas?

Time passed, and so did Alain Delon who eventually decided that the project wasn't for him. So what happened? Did Johnnie To cry and pack up his movie and go home? Of course not. The script was so good that no one wanted to do that. So they hired another French actor for the role, and this time they hired Johnny Hallyday. Sometimes called the "Elvis of France," the 65 year old Hallyday has 18 platinum albums to his name, has sold 100 million records, starred in the arthouse hit THE MAN ON THE TRAIN and has announced his retirement in 2010 after his last concert tour.

Shooting has been underway for a week or so and the Hong Kong press is all over it , reporting the basic outline of the movie and that Felix Wong, Anthony Wong and Simon Yam are also starring in the film. As for that other recently-announced Johnnie To movie, DEATH OF A HOSTAGE, that was reuniting him with Lau Ching-wan, according to someone in the know, it shot for a handful of days before being put on hold for the moment, and it sounds like it's going to take the SPARROW or PTU route, making its way to the screen a little slowly but very surely.

So what's up with Johnnie To's obsession with old French actors? Usually these East-meets-West Hong Kong movies wind up being a bit of a drag more than anything, noble concepts that go off the rails and sink in a swamp of outrageous accents, bad dialogue and bloated budgets. Someone says, "Hong Kong movie with Western actors" and I immediately think of Paul Rudd in GEN Y COPS or Ringo Lam's Cinema City bomb UNDECLARED WAR with Danny Lee, Peter Liapis (of GHOULIES fame), Olivia Hussey, Rosamund Kwan and character actor Vernon Wells. Or any of the Tsui Hark/Jean-Claude Van Damme pictures like KNOCK OFF and DOUBLE TEAM. So why is this one going to be any different?

Because while French New Wave pictures have been screeened and re-screened a million times becoming smooth and featureless in the minds of cinemagoers who have been indoctrinated with the idea that these movies' cinematic heresy is now the canon's received wisdom, what these directors were rebelling against has been far harder to see. Underpraised and underscreened, the French mainstream cinema of the 50's and 60's, that was supposed to be destroyed by the barbaric yawp of the New Wave, now feel like the rebellion the New Wave promised, whereas the rebellion of the New Wave, taught by a thousand joyless academics, has become Revolution in a Can, tasteless, chewy, plastic and unexamined. You just crack it open and plop it on your plate.

But when you get a chance to watch mainstream French cinema from the 50's and 60's, especially the crime films, you discover filmmakers who remind you of nothing more or less than Hong Kong directors in the 80's and early 90's, gleefully wallowing in genre excess while delivering technically accomplished thrills like bursts of machine gun fire. Much has been made of the career of France's master director of the underworld, Jean-Pierre Melville, and his movies like ARMY OF SHADOWS and BOB LE FLAMBEUR are terrific pictures. But when you watch his last movie, UN FLIC, you can be forgiven for feeling like you're peering into an alternate universe where Johnnie To was born Johnny Toulouse. With spare, almost wordless scenes folding into one another; enormous stark set pieces (the opening robbery of a suburban bank branch in a seaside town being chewed up by a savage winter storm feels like out-takes from EXILED); a cast of disillusioned men who commit crimes without hestitation - it feels like a Hong Kong film. Then take a step back to his second-to-the-last movie, LE CERCLE ROUGE, and see this same style on a more lavish scale, all muted blues and grays, wordless men forming alliances and running from the cops as if they've all telepathically agreed to die on the run. John Woo even "presented" LE CERCLE ROUGE when it received a theatrical re-release and Melville even fabricated a quote by the Buddha to give it its title:

"Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: 'When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle'."

It's no wonder Johnnie To wants to remake the darn thing. But while French crime cinema basically ends with Melville, it doesn't begin there. 1955's famously fabulous RIFIFI is not appreciated nearly enough, and it's really the movie that started it all. Easily available on DVD it's been sold as the story of a group of master thieves pulling off a jewel heist, but it's really the tale of a group of tough guys and their amazing suits, doing for the tuxedo, hat and overcoat ensemble what THE MISSION did for cheap suits from G2000. Once you see it, you’ll never forget the moment in RIFIFI when the gang of four crooks pause in the street on their way to the big heist, each dressed to the nines, while in the middle stands their master safecracker, imported from Italy, wearing his tuxedo and tailored overcoat, ready to go to work on the vault.

1974's BORSALINO AND CO, the sequel to BORSALINO, stars Alain Delon at his most lacquered and I would be surprised if John Woo hadn't seen it. It's like a mash-up of A BETTER TOMORROW, THE GODFATHER, HARD BOILED and THE KILLER. The story is bone simple (Delon plays a crime boss, betrayed, seeks revenge) but the violence is epic and brutal and the slick glossiness of the production gives it a jarring discontinuity. Until John Woo arrived on the scene, movies this relentlessly brutal were really this posh; it's almost as if a lavish MGM musical suddenly erupted in blood shed. If you've ever watched a John Woo movie you can't help but thrill to the sight of Alain Delon, who apparently travels with his own eye light, in black tie and tails wordlessly going upstairs to the office in his lavish, wood-paneled nightclub, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves, picking up a sawed off shotgun and striding down to where his car's parked, blowing away wave after wave of hitmen as he goes.

But it's not just the style of the movies that feels so Hong Kong, it's the attitude. The violence coupled with elegance, sure, but also the lack of complexity of the characters. This is not to say that they're shallow, but in these films, as in a lot of Hong Kong movies, thieves are thieves and cops and cops. They don't do a lot of soul searching about their career choices, rather they accept their jobs almost as if they were assigned them at birth, they pursue them with the strictest professionalism and they embrace their ends with a stiff upper lip. "Of course I was going to be gunned down by un flic mere hours after the biggest score of my life," they seem to say, as they lie bleeding their last in the streets. "I am, after all, a criminal. This is my job."

While Johnnie To has said he wants to remake LE CERCLE ROUGE, I'd suggest he look back to 1954's TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI for one of the best of the French crime pictures. This is the story of Max, an aging crook who's still a paragon of high style: by the end of the first hour he's made it with four different women, and his safe house fridge contains nothing but pate and champagne. It turns out that the loot from his Last Score is in danger thanks to some ill-advised lip-flapping from his partner, and so he rounds up his elderly buddies to throw some hand grenades, dish out some torture, and extract some vengeance while wearing Mr. Rogers-style cardigans. Max is sexy, he's tough, he's elegant, he's got a touch of sadism, a lot of class and he's a true professional albeit one who is now a member of AARP. If Chow Yun-fat ever got sick of cashing paychecks from DRAGONBALL Z it's a role that's tailor-made for him. And if you feel like you've seen all the Hong Kong action films that are out there, and you want something that delivers the same rush only, you know, you haven't already seen it a dozen times, then these flicks are for you. You should see them because, god knows, it looks like enough Hong Kong directors already have.