Bob le flambeur

Bob le flambeur (aka Bob The Gambler)(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1958) Everyone wants to be Bob (Roger Duchesne), at least in the Montmartre section of Paris in which he regularly walks the night-streets like a ghost, like a rumor, like a legend. There are lots of stories about him, everyone has one, but Bob used to rob banks, even served time for it, and now wanders from poker game to poker game, where the risks are little and the rewards are paltry. And the casinos? He hasn't won in a long time. Too long.

Everyone wants to be Bob, except for Bob, who wants to be independently wealthy. And the Bob everyone else wants to be? His luck has run out. And he's on a losing streak that seems to never end. He even has a slot-machine in his closet that keeps coming up without a payline. "I'd even lose at hopscotch these days" he says ruefully.

So Bob Montagné—it's his mother's name, and he left home when he was fourteen—wanders around, getting older (looking at his reflection he sees "a real thug's face"), a pillar of his community even if it's been long since where he held anything up. But, he has the underworld community's respect. Even the police commissioner, Ledru (Guy Decomble), owes him something—Bob saved his life once, and it's never been forgotten, and Bob is good for scuttlebutt that the cops can't reach.

So, Bob walks the razor's edge between good and bad, but even he has his limits. When the pimp Marc (Gérard Buhr), whom he loathes, comes to him for help after beating up one of his girls, Bob refuses leaving him out in the cold. Then, meeting an ambitious young thing (Isabelle Corey) in a club, he invites her to his apartment...not for anything salacious, but the girl's been kicked out of her apartment and Bob wants her out of the way of creeps like Marc, steering her, instead, to Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), one of Bob's hangers-ons, who becomes smitten with her. Maybe too much.

Those contacts provide an opportunity. Through the grapevine, Bob hears that there's a big event happening at the Deauville casino—on the day of a big horse race the place is going to be holding 8,000,000 francs in its safe. Bob's safe-cracker pal, Roger (André Garet), has a friend on the inside and says that by 5 a.m. the money will be there for the taking. For Bob, who's been straight for 20 years, the temptation is too great and his luck's been too chancy, so he decides to set up a heist to rob the safe in the early daylight. He gets collateral from McKimmie (Howard Vernon) and sets up the heist like a military operation.

It's the jackpot of a lifetime and Bob is taking no chances. But, you know how things go with heist films, no matter how "New Wave" or cynically amoral they strive to be—something's got to go off-plan. In this case, it's Bob himself that's the crux of the problem; he's too ingrained and too well-connected to keep the machinery of the plot from gnashing its gears and gumming up the works. Plus, Bob's of a particular mind-set: he has a code that the rest of his circle may not, and though he may keep everybody carefully compartmentalized, Montmartre is a small section of town and people run into each other. And no matter what the cards show, you can't get into peoples' heads. Sometimes, not even your own.

Melville's less interested in the heist—you don't even see it, unlike, say, Rififi— than he is in the preparation (there's more suspense in seeing them trying to do it than doing it), but, more importantly is the mind-set of the participants, particularly Bob's. He's a guy who loves to take chances, but even a sure thing—like this robbery—could be bad luck, as it has in the past. Lots of surprises and chance encounters conspire to screw everything up, but the biggest surprise—certainly, to Bob—is the thing that really threatens the robbery. And he has to make a choice, depend on a sure thing...or keep pressing your luck.

Stylish—in a gritty sort of way—Bob le flambeur is one of those movies paying tribute to the past, even as it ushers in a new way of doing things, seeing as how it inspired the French New Wave with its natural lighting, it's long stretches of "play-it-as-it-lays" cinéma-vérité grit, and a cynicism about romanticism—the only kiss that matters is when a card hits the green felt—but codes of conduct define a person are inviolate.