The 1956 French heist movie Bob le Flambeur, a mood piece made by a French director who loved American gangster films, captures what even then was likely a Parisian nostalgia for the immediate postwar years.
Bob le Flambeur occupies the same dreamspace as classics like Casablanca, Pépé le Moko and To Have and Have Not. Few people could inhabit such romantic improbabilities; but these stories’ nostalgia-scented magic has seduced generations of moviegoers into believing they might.
Told in black-and-white, these stories roam the city
streets at night peering in the shadows, the neon signs and streetlights their
silent witnesses. Writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob opens ‘in those moments between night and day, by the dawn’s
early light’; the final curtain comes down at roughly the same hour. Most of
the gambling happens afterhours in bars, clubs and restaurants with the chairs
on the tables.
Yet for all its dark tones this picture is leavened
with a wry nonchalance which would evoke a nostalgia for a time when there was
honor among thieves. Melville’s characters are not as garrulous as Quentin Tarentino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’, but similarly
quip and banter beyond the confines of the narrative.
‘For anyone who
lived in the postwar period, nothing can compare to those days,’ said Daniel
Cauchy, one of the film’s co-stars, interviewed in 2002. Cauchy said that he
was living on Place Pigalle, where much of the story transpires, during the two
years that Melville shot the film. In Cauchy’s view, in the period that
followed five years of war and the German occupation of Paris, ‘things in the
city were easier, people were light-hearted, and those who had money paid for
those who did not’.
In the opening
sequence, a narrator—Melville—tells us that Montmartre, the center of the
action, is both heaven, with a shot of the Sacré-Cœur basilica which crowns the
hill, and hell, showing a tram slowly descending to the bottom and then signage
on Place Pigalle, best known for its ‘boldest-nudes-in-the-world’ girlie shows
and sex workers.
The heist, conceived after the story is underway, is
the straightforward stick-up of a seaside gambling casino in Deauville,
Normandy. After accounting for the technical details, the outcome rides on the
elements of timing, surprise—and Lady Luck.
The film’s main characters are: Robert ‘Bob le Flambeur’ Montagné (Roger
Duchesne), a charismatic reformed
career thief with a gambling problem, his associate Roger (André Garet),
his protégé Paulo (Cauchy) and Yvonne
(Simone Paris), the proprietress of the Pile ou Face (Heads or Tails) Bar,
Bob’s hangout; Lieutenant Ledru
(Guy Decomble), a sympathetic police commissioner; young hoods, pimps and prostitutes of Paris’s Quartier Pigalle on the
make; and Anne (Isabelle Corey), a
teenager ambitious to become a part of this scene.
More than just a gambler, a ‘flambeur’ is a person in
thrall to his passion for gambling—a gambling addict.
Bob, a compulsive gambler, is known by his associates ‘to
win big, but lose bigger’. We see him drag the loyal Roger to the track with hot
tip on a harness race, and then see a smiling Bob collect his winnings at the
window. Yet just as quickly he is cleaned out at the card table.
And he lives with style. Everyone in Quartier Pigalle
(and at police headquarters at 36, Quai des Orfèvres) knows and respects
‘Monsieur Bob’. He has a duplex apartment on Avenue Junot with a picture window
centered on the Sacré-Cœur; he has paintings, art objects and old books. He has a foreign
slot machine in a closet and drives a new American convertible. But luck is not
a lady with Bob.
Nor is Anne, the teenager he tries to prevent ‘sidewalk
Romeos’ from making a ‘pavement princess’, though she wants dearly to be. Bob
first notices the tall, well-built woman early one morning on Place Pigalle as
she buys chips and then climbs on a motorcycle behind an American sailor. He
then meets her in the Pile ou Face after chasing off Marc (Gérard Buhr), a
sidewalk Romeo.
The story is that Melville first spotted the same
‘toute jeune fille trés avancée pour son âge’ on the street and picked
her up in his car as Bob does in the movie. It turned out that Corey was a
model not yet 16 years old. This pretty teenager is not a conventional
Hollywood starlet, and had no screen-acting experience, but her sexuality is
striking—equally for a film director, a collector of precious objects, a
Pigalle wolf, and a moviegoer—and makes her a key piece in this nostalgic
dreamspace.
Cauchy said in his 2002 interview that mobsters were
drawn to actors and directors, not because they were star-struck, but because
the roles the actors played corresponded to the mobsters’ everyday lives. This
had the effect of blurring fiction and reality, he said. Cauchy added that in
the 1950s, he and other movie people socialized, gambled and went to the track
with mobsters, and that these elements worked their way into movies.
Cauchy also noted that Melville may have been the
first film director to show people shot falling backward rather than forward.
He said that he had ‘died’ in several gangster movies
clutching his stomach and falling forward as he had seen actors like James
Cagney and Humphrey Bogart do in American movies. But Melville wanted him just
once to ‘throw himself backward’—and used that shot. ‘I think he heard about
this from someone who was shot during the war,’ Cauchy said.
When Bob complains to Ledru that ‘the mob is not what
it used to be’, Cauchy said, he is referring to how the war changed the Paris
underworld. During the war, half the professional criminals had collaborated
with the Germans as associates of the Bonny-Lafont Gang and the French Gestapo;
the other half, including the Guerini brothers [the Corsican mob] fought for
the Resistance, he said.
French law enforcement under the Nazis blurred the
differences between cops and robbers. The Germans retained French locals with
questionable backgrounds to enforce the law, and insiders made a killing on the
black market though many did not survive the peace. After the war, the Corsicans,
which controlled heroin trafficking through Marseilles, constituted what became
known in the 1950s and 1960s as the French Connection.
At the
casino’s chemin de fer table on the night of the heist, Bob wins big as never
before. But Lt. Ledru has been tipped off. Two pairs of low-slung black Traction Citroëns,
those of the gang and those of the police, converge on the casino entrance at the
appointed hour at daybreak.
Maybe for
once Bob will not lose bigger than he wins.
Among several
remakes and homages to this film are Oceans 11 (1960 and 2001), Paul
Thomas Anderson’s 1996 Hard Eight, and Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief,
made in 2003 with Nick Nolte as Bob Montagnet. Jordan’s film, set in Nice,
updated the original characters, adopted much of the dialogue and added an
intriguing plot wrinkle.
In addition to a high definition digital transfer of
the original print, the Criterion Collection DVD released in 2003 includes the
above-quoted 2002 interview with Cauchy, who also starred in Melville’s Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre (1953) and
Jacques Becker’s 1954 Touchez pas au
Grisbi, among other films.
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