Bob le Flambeur

Absent of the stylization of "Le Samurai" and not as gritty or violent as crime thrillers of the 60's, "Bob the Gambler", from Jean Pier Melville, is none the less an important film historically for it's influence on the crime genre, heist films specifically. However, how does it hold up as a film?

Certainly there is sufficient build up to the heist. We see every step of the planning, with plenty of twists and turns leading up to it, and once things get started, the suspense is certainly there, though without giving anything away, the suspense doesn't come the way one would expect it to, but the tension is definitely there. There is violence, though not a whole lot, and it's obscured, so don't expect much in the way of high octane gun action.

While the sections of the film dealing with the heist itself, the planning, build up and execution would all be enough to make this a fine film, what elevates it even more is the characterization. Bob is a a retired criminal, who all ready served twenty years in prison. Now friends with a cop and living seemingly straight, he's none the less prone to gambling and losing. He takes a father like role to Paulo, who aspires to be like him, and takes a liking to a young woman, Anne. He's seemingly a good person, willing to help others whenever he can. However, when he loses most of his fortune on a foolish bet, he gets a team together for a grand scale heist. This film is about more than a heist, it's about a flawed man whose vices will ensure he is never completely on the straight and narrow. Paulo also falls prey to his desire to win over and impress Anne, at any cost. The highlight of the film for me is the characters, fully realized and done justice by fantastic performances from everyone involved. I won't spoil the ending, but it's one of those endings that makes you completely rethink your earlier perceptions.

Cinematography, while not as amazing as "Le Samurai", is still something to appreciate, with clear influences from American crime and noir films.

SHould be approached as more of a crime drama than a full out, action packed heist film. Definitely recommended.

Jean-Pierre Melville's "Bob le Flambeur" (1955) has been often called the first film of the French New Wave. First or not, French New Wave or not, "Bob le Flambeur" is one of the coolest and memorable films I've seen. The most fascinating element of this exquisite crime/dram/noir film is its title character, Bob Montagne- Bob the Gambler (Roger Duchesne). All women wanted to be with him and all young men wanted to be him. He was the man well respected and liked by the cops, the criminals, and the gamblers alike - the king of cool, the elegant loser with his own respectable code of honor. He drove an American car and wore an American hat but he belonged to the streets of Montmartre, Paris, where he was born just as the film itself that could've been only made by a French director who admired American films and had created a perfect blend of American gangster film and French sophisticated comedy of manners. Made back in 1955, the movie is fresh, crisp, sensual, modern and simply delightful. Having watched already all "Ocean's" movies, including Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack's classic, I see where the inspiration for them came from. "Bob Le Falmbeur" was released in the USA in 1982, nine years after Melville's death and became an instant cult hit. Often, cult movies are not the best made but it is not true in the case of "Bob le Flambeur". Its direction is perfect: seemingly simple and truly elegant, its cinematography is beautiful, its music score is amazing and its characters are not the caricatures - they are the real human beings of flesh and blood and they have something (or a lot) to lose. Acting is great by everyone with Roger Duchesne unforgettable and Isabelle Corey as a young streetwalker Anne whom Bob took under his wing, absolutely marvelous in her first role - child-like innocent yet already perfectly aware of her powers over the men, by the words of Bob's friend, "she will go far -she knows what she wants but does not show it".

This is such a great movie, that does about everything right. It's an early French crime caper movie, that obviously helped to set the standards for later movies.

It's not like there weren't any movies like this prior to this movie but this is one that has all of the modern genre element type of ingredients in it, that we can still see back in todays movies. It perhaps makes this movie seem as a bit of a formulaic and generic one by todays standards but in the light of when this movie got made, it surely is a greatly original one. And it still really is one that is among the best, regardless of the fact that you probably have seen all of the elements in this movie being handled in later ones and better known ones as well.

It has a great story with some equally great characters in it. It's a very rich movie that also manages to capture the right tone, thanks to some fine directing. It has lots of typical crime elements in it, such as an heist, likable 'bad guys' and the cat and mouse game between them and the police.

It really is a fine made movie, that got directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The movie has a good look over it, as well as a nice steady pace. The scene's are being build up great and the entire story gets told effectively. It's a great 'how-to' on directing and storytelling. It feels really like a Hollywoodized version of a French movie but in this case that's a good thing. It's also why this also helped to influence movies from Hollywood as well.

No reason why to not like this movie.

9/10

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Bob le flambeur (1956)

**** (out of 4)

Outstanding heist film about an old-time gangster and gambler (Roger Duchesne) who finds himself broke when he hears that a casino will have a large sum of cash available for the taking. Even though his friends and even the police warn him against it, he decides to try for one last heist. The French noir genre seems to be growing more and more popular each passing year as film buffs continue to check out new, forgotten or need-to-be rediscovered films from the genre. I came to this one first as I had heard it was one of the greatest and it's somewhat hard to imagine, after seeing it, that anything else could really come close. Everything runs so smoothly that one can't help but be entertained by the events going on and especially the noir-ish acts of always blaming the women for everything that goes wrong. This film comes off so fresh and original that one can't help but imagine what it must have been like in 1956 when this stuff really was ground breaking. One of the many positive aspects is the terrific cinematography that constantly has the film floating around and really giving us a great look at the streets, the casino and various other important things for the plot. The way the music score just blends in so well with the cinematography is certainly "New Wave" but it still looks fresh all these years later. Melville's screenplay also offers up some terrific dialogue that really puts you in the middle of what's going on to the point where you feel as if you really are watching real professionals getting ready to pull off a heist. What also stands out are the performances with Duchesne who is wonderful in the title role. I really loved the laid back approach to the character and felt Duchesne had so much energy building up inside of him you couldn't help but keep your eyes on him and watch every little thing he did. Daniel Cauchy, Andre Garet and Gerard Buhr add nice support and it was fun seeing Howard Vernon in a small role years before his work with Jess Franco. Then we have Isabelle Corey who in my opinion steals the show. According to the IMDb she was only 16 when this was released but she certainly captures the sexuality of the role very well and she sizzles each time she is on the screen. It's certainly easy to see why these guys would fall all over her. I'm still very new to Melville but this here is certainly an impressive start and I look forward to checking out more of his work.

the first of Jean-Pierre Melville's astonishing and unique cycle of gangster films, which have been variously called 'ironic', 'structuralist', 'post-modernist', 'doconstructionist', 'existential', 'Lacanian', 'oneiric', 'philosophical' etc. Their influence on modern cinema has been incalculable - Melville's creative indepedence, location shooting and low-budgets inspiring the nouvelle vague; his filming of violent men in action everyone from Scorcese and Coppola to Tarantino and Woo; his deconstruction of genre encouraging Bava and Leone.

Yet in many ways, 'Bob' is the least typical of Melville's thrillers. Where, say, 'Le Samourai' exists in a sparse, abstract, geometric, dreamlike Paris, the Montmartre of 'Bob' in vibrantly alive, with its nightclubs, bars, stray GIs, petty hoods, casual sex, late-night gambling. Where in 'Samourai', the hero's character is pared down to psychological abstraction, Bob is a recognisable human being, stern, but sweet, honourable, a Chandlerian knight, with back-history and motivation. Other characters are plausible, if elusive, also. Where 'Samourai' is a masterpiece of tone, in which direction, acting, cinematography, narrative, sound, colour, decor all cohere into a perfect whole, 'Bob' is a riot of clashing modes, more reminiscent of the gleeful iconoclasm of the nouvelle vague - parody and action, humour and seriousness, dream and realism, co-exist in fertile, thrilling tension.

The hero is what the title suggests, a man who can't stop gambling, moving from one late-night backroom poker-game to another, betting most of his money on horse-races, leaving his diet to a throw of the dice; he even has a fruit machine in his well-appointed flat, where his art collection seems to consist of framed carpet. Yet, ironically, he is a methodical man, keeping to the same routine, the same hours, one night losing a fortune, another making one. Gambling is his only vice now; formerly a con, he did time 20 years previously for a failed bank job - he now considers himself too old for the criminal grind.

After one particularly unprofitable spree, and a chance conversation with a pimp-turned-croupier, Bob and an old friend decide to rob the casino safe at Deauville, and begin rounding up the usual experts and investors, minutely orchestrating the heist. Almost immediately the plans fall through - the dissatisfied wife of the inside man informs the police, as does a thug Bob once refused to help. The casino boss is informed, the police lie in waiting. And yet Bob goes ahead...

For a man who took his pseudonym from one of the great novelists; who adapted most of his films (including 'Bob') from books; and who wrote his own screenplays, Melville has little patience with words, and the story of Bob is brilliantly encapsulated in a series of establishing images. The opening narration eulogises Montmartre with shots defining milieu in realistic terms. yet, when we first see Bob, he is in a setting of extreme artifice, with symbolic chess walls (a recurring pattern) and pictures of, rather than actual, locations. He puts on his trenchcoat and fedora, his signs of movie criminality; whereas Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart's characters WERE gangsters by their deeds, Bob plays the role of a gangster just as Ledru plays the role of a cop, and Anne plays the role of vamp or femme fatale - they are recognisably human behind their 'types', but, in this world made of movies, they cannot do the sensible, plausible thing, but are locked into their roles, despite Ledru's humanistic insistence otherwise. Sense would tell Bob to give up the heist; his pre-ordained role means that he cannot.

As he walks in the early dawn at the beginning, he looks into a tarnished mirror, a further visualisation of the difference between one's self and one's role, identity etc. In an extraordinary long shot, the road-sprayer that circles Bob is echoed in the circular shapes of a nearby park, echoing the circles of the film, the vicious circle Bob gets trapped in, the circles of the casino, the cycles of life. He watches as Anne is picked up by an American motorcyclist - Bob as helpless observer; the movie will dramatise the various ill-fated ways in which he will try to move from passive to active, to stop being a pawn of fate; the frequent, unmotivated-angle shots undermine this. Like all Melville's films, this is not the story of a gangster, but a dismantling of all the concealed codes, ideologies, assumptions, of the gangster, of masculinity, of Hollywood cinema.

One of the ways 'Bob' breaks with traditional cinema is in its anti-Oedipal bias. ; A conventional film often uses an Oedipal trajectory, usually showing an immature hero's moral progress, often defeating an older figure, taking his place and power, and winning the girl. This is a necessary process of continuity for the social order. And this seems to be fulfilled here, as Paolo, who hero-worships Bob, obeying him like a father, takes his place, takes his girl, takes his apartment to have the sex Bob can't have anymore, even using Bob's gestures. Bob is a shadow of himself, de trop in his own home. As it should be. The subsequent narrative could be seen as an attempt of Bob's to regain his identity and power, and to emasculate Paolo.

This sublime film is full of little twists of the norm like this. Isabelle Corey is unprecedented among all film heroines, her amoral, seemingly indifferent sexuality far more suggestive and powerful than her contemporary, Bardot's - her fulfilling her femme fatale role does not result in tragedy any more than Bob's fulfilling his gangster role does.

The use of the narrator is interesting too; voiced by Melville, creator of the film, he is also a kind of God-creator, talking about heaven and hell, taking us on a journey from one to the other; talking from the darkness, about how lives cross, but destinies don't meet, than creating a work where crossed destinies are crucial; intruding at bizarre moments, with prior knowledge of the characters' fates before the action has actually determined them. This, of course, dissipates tension, as does the clownish music, mocking and undermining as much as it propels the action, and the characters' theatricality, their awareness of their roles (eg the rehearsals for the heist like a play).

The filming of this goes way beyond Melville's heist models, 'The Asphalt Jungle' (his favourite movie) and 'Rififi' - after all the plot elements have been put in place - the plan, the preparations, the tip-off, the suspense - Melville moves to a completely different register, and what had been a crime film involving many interested parties becomes a solitary, private rite, Bob's gambling in the casino is a heightened, hallucinatory dream, not quite a rite of death, but a rite of middle-age, of letting go the trappings of youth, also paving the way for the great climax of 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly': the shoot-out is pure, beautiful, dream abstraction.

For many, great cinema is defined in rarefied terms of high art, snobbily above the detritus of popular culture. For some of us, though, great cinema means a transformative enriching and expanding of popular genres, a cinema that can speak to everybody, not above them, but making the familiar strange. Keaton. Hitchcock. Hawks. Whale. Ophuls. Sirk. Leone. Melville.