A filmmaker who redefined the rules of independent filmmaking and influenced a generation of New Wave acolytes, Jean-Pierre Melville was also able to captivate the popular audience with stories of beleaguered existential outsiders—gangsters, thieves, and rogue cops—as they wend their way toward a greater definition of our modern human condition. 
 
Honor Among Thieves profiles this filmmaker’s eventful life and discusses his cinema as an essential body of work in our reckoning of postwar European cinema, and of Melville’s own influence on the filmmakers who admire him.