DVD Tuesday: A Casino, A Heist and Paris by Night: Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur courtesy Criterion
Bob Le Flambeur: A cool, stylish and oh-so-French heist thriller.
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With
Ocean's Thirteen opening this Friday, I found myself thinking about some of my favorite heist and caper movies,
et voilà,
Bob le Flambeur was one of the first to spring to mind. It's this week's DVD Tuesday pick.
The plot is a variation on classic caper themes: 50-year-old Bob Montagne (
Roger Duchesne) is a reformed bank robber turned compulsive gambler (a
flambeur), currently down on his luck and sensible enough to know he's getting too old to be living hand to hand. But he still has his formidable reputation, his silver-fox good looks and his admirers, including young Paulo, who'd love to be
just like Bob when he grows up, but just doesn't have the right stuff. Bob is so effortlessly cool that when he needs a lift home after a night of high-stakes cards, the cops give him a lift. And he maintains a fundamental sense of decency or perhaps correctness is a better word. In any event, it leads him to rescue superficially tough, teenage Anne (
Isabelle Corey) from the clutches of a would-be pimp. She and Paolo begin an affair while Bob and his superannuated pals, acting on an inside tip, put together an elaborate plan to rob Deauville Casino - a job big enough that they can start thinking about genteel retirement.
I'm sure it goes without saying that all does not transpire as planned, because that's also part of the heist formula: the hitch, the last-minute adjustments, the tense moments where it looks as though everything's going straight to hell.
Bob le Flambeur has them all. But if it were all about the heist it would bore me to tears. What keeps me coming back to Bob is Bob - or rather, sleekly dissolute star Roger Duchesne - and Paris, which writer-director
Jean-Pierre Melville treats as a full-fledged character in her own right. (Come on, you
know Paris is a woman.)
Melville, who financed
Bob independently and was working on a shoestring budget, shot on the fly, using handheld camera and a skeleton crew to capture the streets of the seedy, sexy
quartiers of Montmartre and Pigalle by night. At a time when most French movies - and most American ones as well, for that matter - were shot largely in studios, the guerrilla cinematography gives
Bob a stunningly rooted sense of time and place.
Historically, Melville helped pave the way for French New Wave filmmakers like
François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard, who also took their cameras to the
rues et boulevards and spun variations on American pulp fictions. But on a personal level, I would just
love to step into Melville's streets.
Duchesne, who had been a genuine movie star before WWII, was in disrepute when Melville recruited him for
Bob: Some accounts said he was a collaborator. Others - including Melville's (and he was Jewish and had no reason to make excuses for Nazi lovers) - claimed Duchesne had gotten involved with gangsters who ran him out of Paris on a rail. In any event, the seductive, lived-in air of world-weary, down-at-the-heels glamour that Duchesne brings to
Bob is clearly not just acting. He made only one subsequent film, and by 1971 Melville was claiming that the last he'd heard, Duchesne was selling "cars near the Porte de Champerret."
Bob le Flambeur is one of Melville's lighter films, breezy and knowing, but with that oh-so-French hit of doom beneath the frivolity. It's a glittering, dreamy slice of vintage cool, perfect for a cool summer night or a rainy day.
Things to consider:
Bob le Flambeur is as much about Paris as it is about Bob or the casino heist. What are some of your favorite movies in which a city - London, New Orleans, San Francisco, Tokyo, New York - is a real character, not just a backdrop?
Do you love movies about the city you live in? Cities you'd like to live in?
What's the appeal to filmmakers of gamblers and gambling, the subjects of comedies, Westerns and gut-wrenching dramas alike?
English filmmaker
Neil Jordan remade
Bob le Flambeur in 2003 as
The Good Thief, which I think is a terrific movie in its own right. Are there any remakes you like as much as the original?
Previously in DVD Tuesday
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
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Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This week's new DVD releases
