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.

Le Samouraï

Le Samouraï (aka The Godson- 1972 American release)(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) "I never lose. Not really." 

Hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) lies smoking in his austere, gray, drabby little appartement, its only other occupant, a caged parakeet. The shot holds on the room steady with the only movement the smoke in the room. 

And then, the shot wobbles in a slight Vertigo zoom, moves forward and back, almost sickeningly, like an internal alarm clock. 

When it stops, Jef rises, puts on his ritualistic 40's tough-guy costume of a trench coat and fedora and goes to work. The lay of his hat-brim is perfect.

He goes outside. It's raining. Police are checking parking. He waits, just another man in a raincoat in the rain. Then, a Citroen DS pulls up nearby and parks, its owner leaves. Jef goes over to it and gets in, pulls out a wire with 100's of keys on it, and then methodically tries each one. The fourth key works (good thing because the parking cops are approaching), and he leaves, turning into a rural garage where the plates are changed while he waits—smoking—and he is given a gun, which he glances at to make sure it's loaded and with a wrist-flip, snaps the cylinder into place. He's ready for the job...but not yet for after the job.

Before his appointment, he makes two stops: he goes to the apartment of his lover, Jane (Natalie Delon) and tells her that he will have been there from 7:15 pm to 2:15 am—that won't do (her other lover shows up at 2 am) so they change the fictional rendezvous from 7:15 pm to 1:45 am; he visits a back-street poker game and watches for awhile. He asks how long they'll be playing and it's an all-night affair. He says he'll be back and advised to bring cash in case he loses.

That's when he tells the guy he never loses.

"Not really."

Le Samouraï is a gangster movie with no gangsters, and thus, no camaraderie, no boasting and little ego displayed. There is "code" of a sorts, but no loyalty. The job Jef does is tough enough that emotions just get in the way. Jane likes Jef because "you need me"—there's a hole in his soul that she fulfills. He is (as they say in The Godfather) "as cold as they come". Indeed, throughout the entire movie Jef shows no emotion, speaks little, and gives nothing away. He betrays nothing. Not really.

This particular job is to kill the owner of a nightclub—Montey's—and he'll add latex gloves to his apparel to leave no trace, just an impression, and then toss the gloves and gun into the Seine, leave the car out on an anonymous street, one of dozens of Citroens, and disappear into the night, all evidence scattered, untraceable to him, then back to his girlfriends' so he can be noticed leaving at the proper time, and back to the poker game. After those details are taken care of, it's back to his inconspicuous apartment to wait payment...and the next job. Why this particular "hit" is not his concern and not his pay-grade. Do the deed and get away clean enough to get paid.

That's the tricky part. You can't kill somebody without somebody noticing, and when you kill somebody, the police get annoyed. Within the hour, its superintendent—he doesn't even get a name—(Françoise Périer), knowing time is not on his side, puts out a bulletin to "round up the usual suspects" meeting the vague description "tall, young, raincoat, hat" (he wants 20 suspects from each district and with that description 400 suspects for a line-up should be easy to find). One of those pulled in is Jef—from the poker game—and he does stand out from the more contemporaneously dressed riff-raff. The superintendent ("I don't think") does methodic line-ups with the witnesses—the jazz-pianist (Caty Rosier) who ran into Jeff in the hall-way after the kill and a hat-check girl, who didn't really see him, a guest, and bartender and a couple others. Le Commissaire suspects Jef among all of them, but when the two best witnesses take a good look at them, neither of them says he's the man—not even the piano-player, who clearly saw his face. 

Why? It's a question Jef ponders as much as the audience. He should be dead to rights identified as the hit-man, but the piano player deliberately says he wasn't the one she saw. A lucky break, and given the careful way that Jef has set up his alibis—and as no one has to lie, really—he even has the psychological angle covered when Jane's lover, who saw him outside her apartment, lies to incriminate his rival, a move that doesn't hold up under police scrutiny. 

But, the girl...? What is her motivation to lie for Jef. That becomes the enigma of the story and sets the movie to lean into its Japanese-tinted title, despite its French origins. He has two reasons that come to mind: either she's messing with the police, or she was told not to recognize him (it never enters his mind that she might have done it out of the goodness of her heart—but why?). Clearly, he owes her, and as he travels his next few steps, he wants to make the connection why. It might be important later.

So, the police set up elaborate plans to track him...tails, bugging his apartment, harassing Jane to admit she's covering for him...while he goes off to get the rest of his payment. A quick feint on the Metro loses his shadow, letting him meet the go-between on an overpass. But, before they can exchange terms, the guy pulls a gun, grazing Jef's arm before he gets knocked down and disarmed. This isn't good news—he's being chased by the cops and his employers. He gets back to his apartment and bandages himself up. The parakeet acts like a canary in a coal mine, letting him know that somebody's been in his apartment—he'll need that later—and he finds the listening device and disables it. The next step is to find the guys who hired him and why they want to kill him. He won't have to look for long.

Melville's film has a lot of details, but it's a movie as spare in its exposition as a Hemingway story, depending on the visuals to tell the story, especially considering its protagonist is a man of few words and expressions. But, he is a man of habit—like not talking to a man holding a gun on him—and ritual, and those are better shown rather than explained. It's a great directorial strategy for a hit-man—you follow his silent movements (he is antithetically easy to pick out in a crowd) as he stalks his territory in a world that is not a black-and-white noir, but an almost stringently gray one. You watch what he does, not what he says, and, even then, the words may just distract or provide an opportunity for his next actions. 

Same for the director. The movie starts with a quote over that steady opening shot of his apartment: "There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps..."

Perhaps. But, the quote is entirely fictional, created by Melville for the movie.

And perhaps, Jef's remark that "I never lose" is just wishful thinking. And his "Not really" is his more honest disclamation of it.