Synopsis:
Bob is an ageing, former gangster turned gambler in Montmartre (Paris), leading a pleasant if unconventional life with his friend Roger, his protégé, Paolo, and a young woman, Anne, who he has picked up on the street and who he helps out. After a spell of bad luck, he’s running out of money and begins to plan one last robbery, that of a casino in Deauville. Things go badly and Bob is arrested, but not before having won a lot of money legally.
Analysis:
Bob le Flambeur holds a curious position within French film history. The first film that Jean-Pierre Melville made in the studio he had built in Rue Jenner in Paris, even before it was entirely finished, and yet significantly shot on location, Bob le Flambeur was lauded for its ‘imperfect aesthetics’, authorial control, cinephilia, and sense of humour. The film endeared Melville to the emerging generation of French New Wave critics (Melville would appear as Parvulesco, the writer, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless from 1960). But the affinity was short-lived, as Melville would go on to make stylised popular films. By the late 1960s, Melville was criticised for unknowingly making films imbued with the dominant ideology (Vincendeau 2003: 116, 14–16). But Bob remains an intriguing film, suspended between the gangster genre and a more documentary impulse.
Bob le Flambeur is a gangster film, and yet the film uses the formula surprisingly. It came out after the French critics Nino Frank, Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton had appreciatingly defined film noir, and after a number of successful French gangster films, or films noirs, such as Touchez pas au Grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1954) and Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) had been made. But Bob had lower production values, no stars and much more location shooting. Its gangster does not rise (and fall), as the US formula would have it, but had risen before the film takes place, before the Second World War. His criminal life is behind him, he even gets lifts from the police. Deeply nostalgic for the time (and the cinema) of the 1930s, the film is about the legend of gangster, rather than a contemporary gangster. ‘A young old man, legend of a recent past’, the voiceover, spoken by Melville himself, announces, before we see Bob through a reflecting window, in low-key lighting and on a black-and-white set. He’s in a trench coat, puts on a hat, stays in the shadows and leaves a group of gamblers in a bar’s backroom without saying anything. ‘A real hood’s face’, Bob finally says as he looks at himself in a mirror. The gangster is established as a code, as style, a sign.
Bob is a survivor from a fantasised pre-War past, when hoodlums (rather than full-blown gangsters) had a moral code, even if that code was different from mainstream society’s. He remembers a time when guns were not loaded, and attempts to instill the same values into the younger generation, represented by Paolo and Anne. Both Paolo and Anne fall for a very different, more malign kind of hoodlum, Marc, whom Bob refuses to help after learning that Marc had hit one of his women. A good gangster like Bob may be surprising to viewers of 1930s Hollywood gangster films, but the type can be found in pre-War French gangster films, such as Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937). Bob le Chapeau, a documentary included in the French DVD edition of the film, recalls how the Second World War changed the milieu: some gangsters joined the Resistance, others the Gestapo. These deep divisions and lack of trust among criminals remained after the war, at least in the films that imagined gangsters’ lives.
Even as Bob le Flambeur recalls a particularly French version of the gangster film, it simultaneously needs to be understood within the context of Americanisation, in which the fascination with Hollywood participates. Generally speaking, after the Second World War France embarked on a rapid wave of modernisation, partially imposed by the United States (Forbes 1993: 47). Kristin Ross has documented the fascination with American cars in French films from the period (Ross 1995). Melville, who was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, but adopted the American writer’s name, was famous for his Stetsen, his Ray-Bans and his American cars. More specifically speaking, Bob was influenced by John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1950). Melville said in an interview that he had written a first scenario before seeing Asphalt Jungle, and that after seeing the film, he realised that the preparation of a robbery could no longer be done ‘dramatically or tragically’ so he decided to make a more ‘light-hearted’ film (Nogueira 1971: 53). If Bob is thus a film born in transnational exchange, it is harder to say whether it admires, critiques, or is ambivalent about the United States and its cultural presence in France.
Beyond being a gangster film, Bob le Flambeur is also a city film invested in a ‘poetry of the street’ (Vincendeau 2003: 107). In an interview, Melville argued that with the arrival of the Germans during the Second World War, Paris ‘ceased to be an ageold city of mystery’, fondly recalling the Cité Jeanne d’Arc which he likened to a casbah, where ‘no policeman ever dared set foot and where guys used to hide out when the police were after them’ (Nogueira 1971: 58). Opening in the wee hours of dawn, in the first shot of Bob the camera pans across a dark city from a hill (Montmartre), with the voice-over announcing that the neighbourhood is ‘both heaven and hell’ as a funicular, underscored by music, rapidly descends the hill down to Pigalle, a neighbourhood famous for its transgressive and in this film isolated nightlife. ‘People pass each other, forever strangers’, the voice-over says. Here the gangster (even if he has a car) is also a pedestrian wandering around, much in the style of Baudelaire’s flâneur. Thus, after Bob has left the club, we see him in a high-angle shot, a small person crossing an empty street, as a street-cleaning truck spraying water enters the frame, turning around in the square. Despite the poetry of the images, there is a raw quality about them, accentuated by very noticeable editing as well as by changing music and the occasional voiceover. The film’s ‘quality of imperfection’ may have to do with its small budget, and has occasionally led to accusations of amateurism, but is also a studied refusal of seamlessness, a way of creating its rhythm (Vincendeau 2003: 104).
This opening urban scene, with small figures set against the large cityscape also helps establish loneliness and isolation as a theme. Loneliness was part of Melville’s star persona, though the leap from there to his lonely characters may be a bit too tempting (Vincendeau 2003: 19). Such loneliness is deeply gendered, as Melville is known for making films about solitary, melancholy, vulnerable men (Vincendeau 2003: 21). Indeed, Bob is betrayed by two women in the film, Anne, more naïve than she knows, and Suzanne, the croupier’s none too pleasant wife. And yet, the film’s misogyny is complicated by Yvonne, the barmaid who offers Bob money in hopes of keeping him from robbing the casino, by Paolo who naively gives out secret information, and by Bob himself, whose code may be masculinist, but who will not tolerate violence against women and who has a complicated relationship with Anne even as he ‘saves’ her from the street.1 The dominance of the film’s gendered loneliness makes it a near-existential gangster film.
The chance encounters of the opening scene in the city establish chance itself as another main theme of the film. Chance, to the extent that is linked to the ‘arbitrariness of existence and the futility of human endeavor’, harkens back to the film’s existentialism (Vincendeau 2003: 115). But it also takes on a much larger role, penetrating multiple levels of the film. Writing about gambling, Thomas Kavanagh has opposed gambling and chance to narrative logic (Kavanagh 1993: 142). Even the opening scene functions according to this logic: ‘But let’s come back to Bob’, the narrator says, as if he had gotten distracted by the city scene. Chance unravels narrative intent, Kavanagh argues, steering a story in another direction. Bob accidentally sees Anne who will change his story. He goes to the Restaurant Le Carpeaux, even though he said he would go home. Bob accidentally wins money at the horse track, though he knows nothing about the horse he bets on. There are chance encounters and chance comes and goes. Roger accidentally hears that there are 800 million in the casino’s safe. The entire second half of the film represents Bob’s attempt to escape chance and gambling, and to instead impose causal logic and narrative order to insure the success of the heist. Roger ‘practices’ opening the safe. But in the end, chance wins: Bob forgets time and accidentally wins a lot of money. Chance and accidents can thus be good. The theme of chance also makes Bob very different from classical Hollywood characters who tend to drive the plot. Very often, Bob often does not plot, he plays, and his favourite bar is called ‘Pile ou Face’ (head or tails), even though we learn at the end that Bob’s own coin has been doctored to avoid chance. As one critic put it, Bob le Flambeur follows a ‘dramaturgy of distraction’ (Bantcheva 2007: 115).
Chance, which is both a theme and a narrative aesthetic, can also be found in the film’s music. Its use of jazz, in particular, which celebrates improvisation and the individual’s assertion within the group seems well suited to the film (Schulman 2004). At the same time, a consideration of the film’s music would also have to think about its mix of styles.
While Bob le Flambeur may have appeared at a particular historical moment, harkening back to the 1930s, anticipating both the French New Wave and Melville’s own polished gangster films from later, it has also had a deep influence on more contemporary filmmakers. True, Melville’s more stylised later films had more influence on the cool noir of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, but Bob’s irony can also be found in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. And in 2002 Neil Jordan adapted Bob le Flambeur into The Good Thief, with Nick Nolte as a modern-day incarnation of Bob.
Sabine Haenni
Note
1. Vincendeau argues persuasively that Anne does not even manage to be a femme fatale, so that female characters remain marginalised indeed. Instead, Roger who plans everything, is Bob’s partner (Vincendeau 2003: 113–14).
Cast and Crew:
[Country: France. Production Company: Organisation Générale Cinématografique, Productions Cyme, Play Art. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville. Producers: Serge Silberman, Jean-Pierre Melville. Screenwriters: Auguste Le Breton, Jean-Pierre Melville. Cinematographers: Henri Decaë, Maurice Blettery. Editor: Monique Bonnot. Music: Eddie Barclay, Jo Boyer. Cast: Roger Duchesne (Roger ‘Bob’ Montagné), Isabel Corey (Anne), André Garet (Roger), Daniel Cauchy (Paolo), Guy Decomble (Comissaire Ledru), Gérard Buhr (Marc), Colette Fleury (Suzanne), Simone Paris (Yvonne).]
Further Reading:
Denitza Bantcheva, Jean-Pierre Melville, de l’œuvre à l’homme, Paris, Editions du Revif, 2007.
Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France: After the New Wave, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1993.
Thomas M. Kavanagh, ‘The Narrative of Chance in Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur’, Michigan Romance Studies, Vol. 13, 1993, pp. 139–58.
Rui Nogueira (ed.), Melville on Melville, New York, The Viking Press, 1971.
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995.
Peter Schulman, ‘No Room for Squares: JeanPierre Melville, Jazz, and the French Bachelor’, Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 139–48.
Ginette Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville: ‘An American in Paris’, London, British Film Institute, 2003.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.