The French have made some first-class crime pictures, which Americans have been given too few opportunities to see. Luckily, we have Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), one of the greatest caper movies in any language. Non-Francophones might not understand its crackling and untranslatable slang dialogue by Auguste le Breton, who also wrote the incomparable Rififi, but they will feel its rhythm, which is sufficient. And the picture was directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who might as well have invented the French crime movie. Melville—his real last name was Grumbach, his pseudonym an homage to the author of Moby Dick—started making films right after World War II, independent of the studios, working on a shoestring, on location and without stars. Alone of all the French filmmakers of the 1950s, he made pictures entirely on his own terms. His example let the incipient New Wavers know that such a thing was possible.
But Melville, despite his working methods, was a classicist. Bob le Flambeur may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist. It is also one of the most elegiac, with a twilight mood about it. Bob, as courtly and dignified as any all-night gambler ever was but willing to risk his serenity for one last big score, is in Melville’s view a relic of a bygone, pre-war world, when crooks had an independence and integrity not unlike Melville’s own. (The milieu lost much of its charm as a consequence of its collaboration with the German invaders.) Roger Duchesne, who inhabits the role of Bob with equal measures of panache and pathos, was in fact a survivor of that Edenic era.
The movie, while impeccably hard-boiled, is a valentine to a romantic Paris now two or three times removed from our own purview. It all takes place at night, and mostly in Montmartre and Pigalle. The former—the age-old bohemian district on the heights at the top of the city—can be seen to its best advantage framed by the huge window of Bob’s studio apartment. The latter, the hub of strip-tease and whoredom and back rooms and dark alleys, appears here as gallant and swashbuckling a neighborhood as it once perhaps was. The context allows Melville to retail a story that might derive from the troubadour songs of the Middle Ages—a last joust by an aging knight.
Even if you allow for the Frenchness of the enterprise, what you have here is an underworld bearing about the same relation to historical reality as the settings of most Westerns—a place that came into fully-imagined being only in retrospective view. And as with the top rank of Westerns, you’d be a fool to quibble. Its story, setting, and characters may have been shaped by fond and wishful recollection, but there is not a breath of falsehood about Bob le Flambeur. Its tenderness is every bit as strong as its dramatic irony, and its romance can outshoot any lesser picture’s cynicism.
1956
102 min
Black and White
1.33:1
Categories: Film Essays
1 Comments
Wed 26 Nov at 01:11 PM
Matthew Bradley
Bob le Flambeur has a veneer of seriousness that veils a smug playfulness. It is the story of a man who can never cease gambling, participating mostly for the sheer thrill. Bob even keeps a slot machine by his bed, forever feeding the urge for “one more try.”
The main character doesn’t reveal much about his past, and all we know about him is that he was once arrested for robbing a bank (and served his term), and another time he saved the life of a policeman for unknown reasons. He has grown old into a contented shell and has sharply developed characteristics about himself and society. He gambles constantly, but refuses to help out a pimp. He is a strong anti-hero, firmly on the wrong side of law but still holding on to virtue, despite his vices.
There are two key relationships in his story, one with Paulo and one with Anne. Paulo is perhaps treated like a son, and almost a protégée. While Bob looks out for Paulo, he is not an overpowering figure directing him on how to lead his life. He is more of a big brother, despite the age difference. Anne is the lover Bob never had or once lost. He sees in her what he wanted when he was young, but does not stand in the way of her relationship with Paulo. However, the flirtatious nature between Anne and Bob suggests they have a more subtle relationship, and that they are all just playing a game.
The screen is always filled with music and noise, whether a band is playing or not. Bob’s apartment is always accompanied by jazz music, and the lock picking sequence with the microphone and the dog turn potentially depressing or stressful situations into upbeat jaunts.
This is a fun film about taking risks without the notion of consequences, pleasing itself on awkward mannerisms and dry, hard-boiled characters. There are many chances to make this a morality play or a cautionary tale, but Melville keeps these urges beneath the surface, opting instead to create a story that knows it can’t be taken seriously.
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