May 10, 2003
Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur (that's "High-Roller Bob", the Jean-Pierre Melville film that was recently remade as The Good Thief) defied my expectations, and I'm not entirely sure that that was a good thing. With its set-up (semi-retired hood decides to go for one last score, which I hope was less tired in 1955), Melville's clear feel for noir as demonstrated in Le Samourai (one of the most purely iconic crime films I've ever seen), and a screenwriter fresh from writing the great French caper film Rififi, this could have been a great crime movie, if that was what it wanted to be.
Bob has run through the small fortune he made as a bank robber in his earlier days thanks to an impressive losing streak as a gambler and his expensive habits playing lord of the manor over of motley collection of Parisian low-lifes; he shows his disdain for mere pimps, tries to rescue a pretty young thing from a life of streetwalking, tries to steer his protege towards playing it smart, and so on. These are all things that a lesser movie -- say one made circa 1992, with Joe Mantegna as a hood trying to make it straight -- might have adopted.
But the movie seems curiously uninterested in the nature of the crime itself, despite some Rififi-like attention to the actual mechanism of the safe the crooks plan to burgle. Things go disastrously wrong, but the real attention is to Bob's social circle and to Paris lit by neon, where things are good and good for you. You can almost feel the movie sending its vibe out to Truffaut and, particularly, Godard; Isabelle Corey, as the disaffected semi-prostitute, seems almost perfectly Godardian in her envelope of amused nihilism. The twists and turns in the planned casino raid are dealt with almost haphazardly. Bob and his family of hangers-on get to play out their drama with the casino heist almost as a perfunctory backdrop. Unlike Rififi, the actual location of the crime never becomes vivid to the audience; the scenes all seem edited to end a beat too soon or last a beat too long; when things go disastrously wrong, it's seems like the punch line of a monstrous shaggy dog story that left me and my friends slack-jawed.
Bob le Flambeur was gorgeous to watch and its importance to the development of New Wave and Nouvelle Vague is really evident, but it wasn't what I really expected to watch: a great French crime movie.
Interesting. I hadn't realized the Rififi connection.
Yeah, and there were these little bits of Rififi peeking through, especially when they were planning the safecracking and blocking out their raid. I'm curious as to whether the script started out as more of a straight crime thriller before Melville got his hands on it; if there's a decent biography of him available, I might try to get it through inter-library loan.
It was good, don't get me wrong. It's just that much of the value came from watching Roger Duchesne inhabit his role and from the movie being so clearly an antecedent of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player.
Now I want to watch Le Samourai again.
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