Though it was only his fourth film, Bob le Flambeur—the rarely used English-language title is usually Bob the Gambler—features a structure and protagonist that are pure Jean-Pierre Melville.
The viewer meets the ostensible hero in the middle of the night while he is at his task—gambling, obviously—and sees that he is a reserved creature of habit. He lost a bunch of money, well, that is part of being a gambler. The first act continues, introducing Bob (Roger Duchesne) and his broader milieu, the semi-legal bars and betting parlors of the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris, populated by pimps and prostitutes as well as degenerate gamblers. Bob has friends, especially Paulo (Daniel Cauchy), the barely-adult orphaned son of an old colleague of his from his original job. Bob, it is revealed, used to be a bank robber, back in the heady days of the Depression, and had gone to jail; Paulo’s dad was not so lucky.
With his cast of nocturnal hustlers, Melville sees Bob le Flambeur as a noir homage to the post-War Hollywood films he loved. This means the film needs a femme fatale, so enter Anne (Isabelle Corey), who Bob rescues from a violent, predatory pimp, Marc (Gérard Buhr) before setting her up with Paulo. Bob may be a crook, but he has a good heart; most of Melville’s protagonists are similar Robin Hood-like souls with a solid moral center despite their professional criminality. Melville’s films, like Scorsese’s or Michael Mann’s, are male affairs, so Anne is thinly written, but she is there more as a plot device than a character anyhow.
After Melville has established the protagonist, the side characters, the setting and the genre for the viewer, he then allowed Bob le Flambeur to continue. This systematic approach to filmmaking is a Melville staple: he is rigorous about laying out the parameters. What comes next is the build up to the final grand set piece; for Bob le Flambeur, the viewer learns that the eponymous hero is going to revert back to his days of knocking off banks with a plan to crack the safe of the Deauville casino. In classic heist film fashion, the ragamuffin cast of characters are now assembled as a crew of professional conmen. It will be one last job—rumor has it that there are hundreds of millions of francs locked inside—and Bob and his leading accomplices plan the whole thing out in excruciating detail. Melville’s films always emphasize the planning and the procedures, just as his protagonists are usually fastidious and restrained. Bob le Flambeur is certainly no different: the viewer knows exactly how the heist is supposed to happen.
But this is a noir film, so things are not going to go as planned. It is also a Melville film, so the twists are not always so easy to forecast…
This is filmmaking by checklist. Melville is ticking off the boxes, like a novel by someone who learned to write novels by reading a how-to book. Somehow, though, for Melville it works. It always works, even in his later films when the setting becomes more of a hyperreal almost-reality rather than a well-realized Montmartre. Bob le Flambeur is fast-paced, shot on location and full of homages (including a quite amusing allusion to the “lasso the moon” line from It’s a Wonderful Life).
In terms of the history of both Melville’s career and cinema more broadly, Bob le Flambeur is a vital movie. It is widely considered—including by Roger Ebert—to be the first film of the French New Wave, with its slapdash camera work, super low-fi action sequences, cast of lovable underworld ne’er-do-wells out at all hours of the night, and odes to Hollywood. It even features a jump cut. For Melville, it is generally viewed as the film that launched his career as an auteur who gained a high degree of creative control over his future efforts. A quick glance at his subsequent filmography suggests that this is a good interpretation: after Bob le Flambeur, Melville’s films take on a greater deal of uniformity of theme and characterization.
The post Oeuvre: Melville: Bob le flambeur appeared first on Spectrum Culture.