Jean-Pierre Melville - Bob le flambeur (1956)

Suffused with wry humor, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication to lay the roadmap for the French New Wave. As the neon is extinguished for another dawn, an aging gambler navigates the treacherous world of pimps, moneymen, and naïve associates while plotting one last score—the heist of the Deauville casino. This underworld comedy of manners possesses all the formal beauty, finesse and treacherous allure of green baize. Criterion




Bob, a old gangster and gambler is almost broke, so he decides in spite of the warnings of a friend, a high official from the police, to rob a gambling casino in Dauville. Everything is planed exactly, but the police is informed about the planned coup. Meanwhile in the Casino Bob starts to gamble. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0047892/plotsummary)




In Paris's Montmartre district, everyone knows Bob, a well-dressed compulsive gambler. He's generous, moralistic, drives a two-toned convertible coupe, lives in a swank apartment, and has the respect of the police. But he's on a losing streak, and even when he hits it big at the track, he loses at the Deauville casino. When he learns that the casino keeps a fortune on Grand Prix weekend, he plots a robbery. Subplots trace a seemingly innocent coquette's social climb and the greed of a croupier's wife who betrays the thieves. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0047892/plotsummary)




A singular masterpiece that served as a clarion call for the coming French New Wave, this 1955 love letter to the city of Paris and the American urban noir films of the 1930s and 1940s is precisely the sort of cinematic consideration of genre influences that became the soul of early works by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. (--Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (a filmmaker so enamored of American culture he adopted the name of Moby Dick's author), Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler) concerns a courtly gangster who plans on robbing a casino. But the film is less about the trappings of a conventional heist tale than about Melville's embrace of the form and his wistful weavings within it. (--Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




The title character (Roger Duchesne) is almost a knight errant, with a visible gallantry and code of loyalty suggesting Melville's own dreams of film tradition, reinvented into something both faithful and new. A terrific experience and an important sliver of film history. (--Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)