Bob le flambeur

Cult director Jean-Pierre Melville was originally involved with French art legend Jean Cocteau, but really found his niche making hard boiled crime movies. 'Bob le flambeur' was the first major work by him, and he kept making movies up until the early 1970s with 'Dirty Money'. His work had a huge influence on the French New Wave led Godard and Truffaut (who cast him in a supporting role in 'Breathless' as an acknowledgment), and has proved to be a major inspiration for American film makers like Scorsese, Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson whose debut 'Hard Eight' owes 'Bob le flambeur' quite a debt. 'Bob..' really knocked me out, and along with the equally brilliant 'Rififi' directed by Jules Dassin and released the same year, it's one of THE great crime movies of the 1950s, and should be mentioned in the same breath as Huston's 'The Asphalt Jungle' and Kubrick's 'The Killing'. All four films have had an enormous influence on most subsequent movies in the heist genre. 'Bob's plot is quite simple but the story itself isn't the half of it. What Melville DOESN'T say is just as important as what he does, and the viewer has to piece a lot of it together for himself. Roger Duchesne is super cool as Bob, the ageing gambler on a perpetual bad streak, Daniel Cauchy is excellent as his cocky young protege Paolo, and Isabelle Corey is sexy and intriguing as Anne, the jailbait who gets involved with them both. Personally I prefer this movie and 'Rififi' to 'Breathless' and any French New Wave I've seen to date, but that says as much about my taste as much as the movies themselves. Even so I highly recommend 'Bob le flambeur' to anybody who involves crime movies. It's a classic of the genre, and still fantastically entertaining.

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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Coming a few years before Jean-Pierre Melville's ongoing obsession with trenchcoats and fedoras, Bob Le Flambeur is probably his most traditional noir flick, centered around the titular Bob (played by Roger Duchesne), an aging gangster who decides to go in for one final gamble by robbing a local casino. He recruits a small group of partners to come in with him, but the arrival of the beautiful young Anne (played with compelling charm by Isabelle Corey) throws a rift in the dynamic of the group and we all know how a girl can bring the downfall of a great many men.

It's all relatively standard procedure, but it's interesting to see Melville developing what would eventually become his trademark style. The film doesn't have the unbelievably slick style of Le Samourai or the brooding grit of Le Doulos, but at times you can see pieces of each and it's all built around an interesting central figure. Bob is a man who we never get the chance to fully explore, but it's that stoicism, that mystery, that makes him all the more engaging. Duchesne plays him with a haunted, world-worn reserve that reminded me of the kind of stuff that George Clooney has been doing for the last five years or so. Bob Le Flambeur ends up being a character study more than anything else, which made me kind of curious as to why Bob essentially takes a backseat to the supporting characters for the middle stretch of the film.

After the first act establishes him he almost disappears and we instead focus a lot more on the cops and Bob's young protégé Paolo (Daniel Cauchy). It was a disappointing turn, made all the more so by how interesting things got once we returned full-on to Bob in the final act. It's a diversion that's easy to understand in order to bring about the conflicts that drive the overall narrative, but it made me wish that we had been focusing on him entirely the whole time. Still, it's an ultimately minor complaint in an otherwise solid, if not overly impressive Melville entry. The film features an excellent ending as well, closing out on a high point.

Imagine a movie in which a gambler finds out about a huge payday at a casino and decides to pull off a major heist. He and a couple of friends find a rich backer to put up the money necessary to pull such a large heist and then Bob (the gambler) decides to enlist some others to help out. In the end, he has involved not 9, not 10, but 11 people in the heist. Sound familiar. This hugely influential film by Jean-Pierre Melville has spawned both versions of Ocean's 11 and is also often credited as the grandfather of the Nouvelle Vague movement.

This movie is French, so unlike the American versions of Ocean's Eleven, there is no singing, no laughing, no hi-fiving, just straight-faced gambling, plotting and even the loving is grim and made without a smile. The characters are memorable, especially Bob and Anne as they go through life expecting no happiness. Bob never goes to bed before 6am, as he spends his nights, every night, gambling at different locations. This addiction is part of who he is and plays a key role in the twist at the end.

This movie is like a good strong Camembert. As with many French movies, definitely an acquired taste, but once one learns to appreciate the sharpness, one realizes that there is nothing comparable. Camembert, unlike bacon, is not the food of joy. But it is good, flavorful, and powerful in making one want to partake again and again. Until you feel the tanginess in your mouth, there is no describing the taste or effect, but it is definitely worth the effort to build an appreciation for it. 8/10

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.