July 27, 2001 | Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) walks like a slumming prince through the shadowland of pre-dawn Paris. His hat tilted at a jaunty angle, a cigarette dangling from his frowning lips, he’s a trenchcoated knight errant, master of all he surveys.
Still ruggedly handsome in his autumnal years, he has the imperturbable bearing of someone who has seen it all, done it all, and cared for little of it. Even so, there’s still some spark in the old boy. As he notes the sidewalk flirtations of a teen-age temptress, you can see a flash of disapproval in his near-impassive eyes. But if you look closely enough, you’ll also see a flicker of bemused appreciation.
Quite an entrance, eh? And quite a larger-than-life creation, this Bob Montagne, the hardboiled but honorable hero of Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), the newly reissued 1955 melodrama directed and co-written by the late, great Jean-Pierre Melville.
A charming rogue with a prison record, Bob remains a friend of the police inspector (Guy Decomble) whose life he impulsively saved years ago. But their friendship has certain limits: He doesn’t ever want to be seen in public with the veteran cop. After all, both men have their reputations to consider.
Bob is something of a father figure, playing mentor to a young hothead named Paulie (Daniel Cauchy) and protector for the casually voluptuous Anne (Isabelle Corey). But Bob also has his stern side: He’ll have nothing to do with a lowlife like Marc (Gerard Buhr), a brutally treacherous pimp. Even on the mean streets of Montmartre, the notorious neighborhood Bob calls home, a man is known by the company he keeps.
A journeyman actor who never again landed such a juicy role — and who had, Melville would later claim, more than a few real-life underworld connections — Duchesne authoritatively plays Bob with equal measures of grit and grace. In the opening scenes of Bob le Flambeur, this tarnished silver fox seems to be semi-retired from mischief. All it takes, however, is one last challenge to lure him back into the game. And long before Melville’s movie reaches its wittily ironic climax, a challenge is just what Bob gets.
After a long streak of bad luck at racetracks and all-night card games, Bob has second thoughts about the straight life. When a friend speaks of a fortune held in the safe of the Deauville Casino, he listens. One last big risk for one last big score — for Bob, it’s a fair trade. At first, the odds appear stacked against him. But Bob always has an ace up his sleeve.
Like most films directed by Melville — who was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, but took his nom de cinema from the author of Moby Dick — Bob le Flambeur received only spotty international distribution before the director’s death at 55 in 1973. Indeed, this raffishly entertaining melodrama wasn’t widely released in the United States until 1982. The current reissue offers an invaluable opportunity to better appreciate how Melville has influenced, and continues to influence, later generations of filmmakers. Better still, Bob le Flambeur remains, even for moviegoers normally averse to reading subtitles or viewing black-and-white classics, a great deal of fun. Which, when you think about it, really counts for more than all the historical relevance in the world.
A forerunner of the auteurs who launched the French New Wave in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Melville eschewed studio sets and lavish production values, preferring to work on real locations – on real streets, in real apartments and alleyways — with small camera crews. He used many of the same semi-guerrilla techniques later adopted by such New Wavers as Francois Truffaut (who cast Decomble, the grizzled cop of Bob le Flambeur, as a strict schoolteacher in The 400 Blows) and Jean-Luc Godard. In 1959, Godard acknowledged the debt by casting Melville as a visiting celebrity in Breathless, and peppered that movie’s dialogue with references to a certain Bob Montagne.
Much like many of the younger New Wavers, Melville paid affectionate tribute to American film-noir thrillers of the ’40s and early ’50s. The big difference is, Melville’s tributes came first.
Bob Montagne obviously is blood kin to the noble tough guys once essayed by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. But Bob le Flambeur is not a slavish imitation, or an overly reverential homage. The movie can be enjoyed on its own terms, for its own merits, as a street-smart comedy of manners, and as a slyly stylized evocation of underworld life in post-World War II Paris. Call it pulp fiction elevated to high art by a romantic sensibility, and you won’t be far off the mark.
Melville continues to influence filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva) and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs). John Woo freely admits he has borrowed from such Melville classics as Le Samurai (1967) — whose hit-man protagonist, icily played by Alain Delon, is an obvious role model for Chow Yun-Fat’s anti-hero in Woo’s The Killer (1989) — and Le Cercle Rouge (1970).
Director Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) has gone one step further: He’s actually planning a remake of Bob le Flambeur, titled The Good Thief, with Nick Nolte in the lead role. Sounds promising, I admit. But the original is a tough act to follow.
