Léon Morin, prêtre

This is Melville's first film with a star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom he would go on to make three films. They met on the shoot of Vittorio de Sica's Ciociara (Two Women), and Jean-Paul Belmondo was initially hostile to the project until Melville convinced him to play a role against type. Léon Morin, prêtre, "breaks down the borders of anecdote, loses its restrictive religious character, and achieves, in the simplest, most honest, and therefore most difficult way, a universal dimension" (Claude Sautet). "What attracted me Béatrice Beck's book, that I had wanted to adapt since it was published in 1952, was the character of Léon Morin because of the non-autobiographical way of telling what is personal, I think, to all creators, because if I had been a priest I would have reacted like him... In everything he does, a director must be able to disguise himself in a costume of the same colour as the story he is telling" (J-P Melville).