Bob le Flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who loved America and its cinema so much that he changed his last name to that of the author of “Moby Dick,” wanted to do a light-hearted crime film, and with the help of Auguste Le Breton, a writer specializing in heist movies, made, in 1956, Bob Le Flambeur, which roughly translated means Bob the Gambler. The financial and critical success of this picture established Melville as one of France’s top filmmakers.

Bob Montagné, played by Roger Duchesne, an aging gambler who has previously done time for bank robbery, runs into a streak of very bad luck at the tables. To avoid financial ruin he puts together a team of criminals, and devises a plan to rob the Deauville casino. Although the story is inspired by John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Bob Le Flambeur is remarkable for being almost entirely concerned with atmosphere more than plot. We are introduced first to the streets and nightclubs of Montmartre. We are then made gradually familiar with Bob’s strange lifestyle—traveling about to different card and craps games throughout the night, until he comes home to sleep at 6 A.M.—and his various eccentric and seedy acquaintances.

It’s only after quite some time that anything resembling a story starts to take shape. Even then, Melville lingers over the details of the characters’ rooms, or their casual conversation, while the heist plot develops in what seems an almost throwaway manner. Seeing it now, long after the French “New Wave” that followed in the 1960s, we are more familiar with such methods, but in 1956 this must have seemed very different indeed. In fact, Melville’s elliptical camerawork and staccato editing were a strong influence on the New Wave, as well as his playful sense of homage to other films.

The white-haired, somewhat portly Duchesne plays the part of Bob as if he were living it, with a slightly weary air and a sense of complete comfort and familiarity with the nocturnal world of the gambler. One of the film’s charms is that all the characters seem a bit “off”—Bob’s nephew and protégé (played by Daniel Gauchy) seems more like a goofy kid than a tough guy, and the girl (Isabelle Cory) that Bob takes under his wing (and secretly wants, although she sleeps with the nephew) is scarily self-possessed, yet somehow vacant as well.

It’s as if Melville wanted to see how the characters in a film noir might actually behave, with all the stretches of ordinary time and events that a Hollywood film would leave out. It’s kind of a bizarre idea, and the picture has an odd, laconic rhythm that takes some getting used to. Even the ending, which features an ingenious and amusing plot twist that ties all the themes together by a single stroke, is depicted without dramatic emphasis, as a momentary, flippant irony. Although Bob le Flambeur tells the story of an older man reaching the end of his rope, it’s really a youthful film—brash, experimental, perhaps a bit too cocky for its own good, but with a style still fresh and novel, after all these years.