Alphaville

Author: Jean-luc Goddard

Secret Agent Lemmy Caution of the FBI is as hard-boiled as they come. The central figure in a number of British novels, he became an important figure in French cinema in the 1950s. French New Wave master Jean-Luc Goddard took Caution out of the traditional dark Noir world in which he typically plied his trade and brought him to a dystopian future run by a computer, the Alpha-60. The Alpha-60 has outlawed all art and other emotional endeavours, and its in this world that Lemmy Caution has to bring down the Alpha-60, and with it, Alphaville. The heady psychedelic story and mad computer, certainly influenced Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the darker-than-darkest night setting of Alphaville can be seen in the sets of everything from Blade Runner to Dark City, The Matrix to Serenity. Eddie Constantine had played Lemmy Caution several times before, and would continue to play him until the early 1990s, and manages to bring the gruff intensity he would give him detective films to this scifi mindbender. Why it's on the list Goddard's deft handling of science fiction is poetic, strange, and very, very French.