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DVD Tuesday: A Casino, A Heist and Paris by Night: Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur courtesy Criterion
Bob Le Flambeur: A cool, stylish and oh-so-French heist thriller.
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See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!
With Ocean's Thirteen opening this Friday, I found myself thinking about some of my favorite heist and caper movies, et voilà, Bob le Flambeur was one of the first to spring to mind. It's this week's DVD Tuesday pick.
The plot is a variation on classic caper themes: 50-year-old Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) is a reformed bank robber turned compulsive gambler (a flambeur), currently down on his luck and sensible enough to know he's getting too old to be living hand to hand. But he still has his formidable reputation, his silver-fox good looks and his admirers, including young Paulo, who'd love to be just like Bob when he grows up, but just doesn't have the right stuff. Bob is so effortlessly cool that when he needs a lift home after a night of high-stakes cards, the cops give him a lift. And he maintains a fundamental sense of decency… or perhaps correctness is a better word. In any event, it leads him to rescue superficially tough, teenage Anne (Isabelle Corey) from the clutches of a would-be pimp. She and Paolo begin an affair while Bob and his superannuated pals, acting on an inside tip, put together an elaborate plan to rob Deauville Casino — a job big enough that they can start thinking about genteel retirement.
I'm sure it goes without saying that all does not transpire as planned, because that's also part of the heist formula: the hitch, the last-minute adjustments, the tense moments where it looks as though everything's going straight to hell. Bob le Flambeur has them all. But if it were all about the heist it would bore me to tears. What keeps me coming back to Bob is Bob — or rather, sleekly dissolute star Roger Duchesne — and Paris, which writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville treats as a full-fledged character in her own right. (Come on, you know Paris is a woman.)
Melville, who financed Bob independently and was working on a shoestring budget, shot on the fly, using handheld camera and a skeleton crew to capture the streets of the seedy, sexy quartiers of Montmartre and Pigalle by night. At a time when most French movies — and most American ones as well, for that matter — were shot largely in studios, the guerrilla cinematography gives Bob a stunningly rooted sense of time and place.
Historically, Melville helped pave the way for French New Wave filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who also took their cameras to the rues et boulevards and spun variations on American pulp fictions. But on a personal level, I would just love to step into Melville's streets.
Duchesne, who had been a genuine movie star before WWII, was in disrepute when Melville recruited him for Bob: Some accounts said he was a collaborator. Others — including Melville's (and he was Jewish and had no reason to make excuses for Nazi lovers) — claimed Duchesne had gotten involved with gangsters who ran him out of Paris on a rail. In any event, the seductive, lived-in air of world-weary, down-at-the-heels glamour that Duchesne brings to Bob is clearly not just acting. He made only one subsequent film, and by 1971 Melville was claiming that the last he'd heard, Duchesne was selling "cars near the Porte de Champerret."
Bob le Flambeur is one of Melville's lighter films, breezy and knowing, but with that oh-so-French hit of doom beneath the frivolity. It's a glittering, dreamy slice of vintage cool, perfect for a cool summer night or a rainy day.
Things to consider:
Bob le Flambeur is as much about Paris as it is about Bob or the casino heist. What are some of your favorite movies in which a city — London, New Orleans, San Francisco, Tokyo, New York — is a real character, not just a backdrop?
Do you love movies about the city you live in? Cities you'd like to live in?
What's the appeal to filmmakers of gamblers and gambling, the subjects of comedies, Westerns and gut-wrenching dramas alike?
English filmmaker Neil Jordan remade Bob le Flambeur in 2003 as The Good Thief, which I think is a terrific movie in its own right. Are there any remakes you like as much as the original?
Previously in DVD Tuesday
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Jun 4, 2007 6:18 PM
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Boy, there I was in my alley when lo and behold I see you and Bob Le Flambeur walking right up it. This is is a favorite of mine and before I take the time to answer your questions I want to mention another great French heist film starring my favorite actor, Jean Gabin. It's called Touchez Pas Au Grisbi 0r Don't Touch The Loot. As with most of Gabin's films (especially Grand Illusion, La Bandera Pepe Le Moko and Les Bas-fronds) it's well worth looking for.
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Jun 5, 2007 4:03 AM
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Because I like in L.A., I do love cities about Los Angeles or Cali. I don't know how to really think of the setting of a movie as being a "character" although I think I get your drift. For me, it's about getting the feeling that I am in that locale... for example:
Speed makes me feel like I am in L.A.
Salvador makes me feel like I am in El Salvador
Diva transports me to Paris
To Catch a Thief puts me in the French Riviera
Alphaville makes me feel like I am in Alphaville
If I can think of some other examples, I will add them later... gotta get back to "work"...
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Jun 5, 2007 12:04 PM
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I, a born and raised New Yorker, love New York movies. I especially love films shot here in the '70s, when I was growing up, because I'm enthralled by the sight of buildings that have disappeared and neighborhoods that have changed beyond regognition.
But I also adore movies shot here in the 1950s -- someone once told me that everyone loves books and movies from the decade before they were born because they're a window into the world of the parents who made them. My gut tells me that there's some real truth to that: My father was raised in New York and my mother came here to marry him in the mid '50s. I worte a piece about Times Square movie theaters for Time Out in 2001, and much though I loved recalling my own grindhouse experiences, I was absolutely fascinated by my mother's memories of going there in the '50s and worrying that the mad bomber had left an explosive under one of the seats.
And I love movies shot in New Orleans -- I gave them a chapter ("Easy Does It") in Movie Lust. I've only been there half a dozen times (none post-Katrina), but it cast a spell on me.
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Jun 5, 2007 11:11 PM
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Maitland, I love both those cities. But when it comes to New York City, I prefer actual archival footage. I love to see glimpses of the actual streets so I watch a lot of documentaries on PBS about everything from jazz and Broadway to the Beatniks and Stonewall. I also love seeing footage of the sleazy stores and the sordid battleground of Times Square in the 70's. Oh, what a world! I envy your misspent youth!
P.S.
Recommendations for video rentals with lots of this type of footage would be appreciated!
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Jun 6, 2007 2:03 AM
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I have to agree with Achey about archival footage of New York although, like Maitland, I love seeing films set there from past decades. It was the New York I saw in the gangster movies of the 1930's and even the fascinating Casbah-like slums of the Dead End Kids movies that drew me to eventually move to NYC. The city was always a full character for me when it appeared in a film.
I had a rare experience watching a film set in my hometown of Detroit. In 1947's T-Men there was a scene filmed on the block that contains Detroit's Art Institute and Main Branch of the Public Library. I had spent a lot of time in that area, in those and other buildings, often crossing the street from the same spot as the camera P.O.V. It was odd to see something so familiar-Detroit wasn't a big movie making town-but so different-the main difference being that travelling through the scene of that block that looked exactly the same as it had when I had walked or driven thorugh so many times, were streetcars, long out of commission by the time I came along.
**********
Cleveland is very much a character in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. And rare is the movie set in New Orleans that doesn't want to make me return for what would be my ninth visit. I can't think of one particular movie set in London that makes me want to go there but most that I see make me feel that way.
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Jun 6, 2007 3:39 AM
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A thought about New Orleans- as intriguing as the city is in reality and on film I am having a hard time thinking of a movie set there that I really consider great. I guess I'll have to consult that chapter in Movie Lust unless anyone has a few suggestions.
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Jun 6, 2007 3:44 AM
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DaMess:
I don't know if it was a set or not, but the funeral procession scenes in Live and Let Die look exactly like the French Quarter to me! Fancy but not sanitized like Main Street U.S.A.
Your comments on Detroit remind me of this clip I found where they show a computer generated version of Culver City in the 20's and match some exteriors to scenes in Laurel and Hardy films:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qkv9ZbmMAk
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Jun 6, 2007 12:51 PM
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One of my favorite movies set in Paris is the 1945 French film Children of Paradise. The fact it even got made at all in the middle of WWII is amazing. It used to play several times a year in NYC during the heyday of retrospective theaters.
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Jun 6, 2007 3:00 PM
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As you can see by my user name, it's the New York of "Bell Book and Candle"... Greenwich Village jazz clubs, the Flatiron bldg in the snow...
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Jun 6, 2007 10:23 PM
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Some great location shots of 1970s ( which really means late 19th century on)Greenwich Village in Paul Mazursky's
Next Stop, Greenwich Village which features a young Christopher Walken and Antonio Fargas, knockout work from Shelley Winters and Mike Kellin and a very early appearance from Jeff Goldblum. Great interiors in some of the restaraunts and espresso shops-the Village never looked better or more promising.
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Jun 7, 2007 3:43 AM
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Nice!
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Jun 7, 2007 12:17 PM
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