''Bob le flambeur'' (English translation": "Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller") is a 1956 French heist

gangster film A gangster film or gangster movie is a film belonging to a genre that focuses on gangs and organized crime. It is a subgenre of crime film, that may involve large criminal organizations, or small gangs formed to perform a certain illegal act. Th ...

directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and starring

Roger Duchesne Roger Duchesne (27 July 1906, Luxeuil-les-Bains, Haute-Saône – 25 December 1996) was a French film actor. He appeared in 30 films between 1934 and 1957, but is best remembered for playing the lead in ''Bob le flambeur'' (1956). He was the f ...

as Bob. It is often considered both a

film noir Film noir (; ) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American '' ...

and a precursor to the

French New Wave French New Wave (french: La Nouvelle Vague) is a French art film movement that emerged in the late 1950s. The movement was characterized by its rejection of traditional filmmaking conventions in favor of experimentation and a spirit of iconocla ...

, the latter because of its use of handheld camera and a single

jump cut A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which a single continuous sequential shot of a subject is broken into two parts, with a piece of footage being removed in order to render the effect of jumping forward in time. Camera positions of the subj ...

Plot

Bob is a gambler who lives on his own in the

Montmartre Montmartre ( , ) is a large hill in Paris's northern 18th arrondissement. It is high and gives its name to the surrounding district, part of the Right Bank. The historic district established by the City of Paris in 1995 is bordered by Rue Ca ...

district of

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

, where he is well-liked by the demi-monde community. A former bank robber and convict, he has mostly kept out of trouble for the past 20 years, and is even friends with a police commissioner, Ledru, whose life he once saved. Ever the gentleman, Bob lets Anne, an attractive young woman who has just lost her job, stay in his apartment in order to keep her from the attentions of Marc, a pimp he hates. Bob declines Anne's advances, instead steering her to his young protégé Paolo, who soon sleeps with her. Through Jean, an ex-con who is now a croupier at the casino in Deauville, Bob's friend Roger, a safecracker, learns that, by 5:00 in the morning on the day of a big horse race at the nearby track, the casino safe is expected to contain around 800 million

French franc The franc (, ; sign: F or Fr), also commonly distinguished as the (FF), was a currency of France. Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money. It w ...

s in cash. As Bob has had a run of bad luck, he plans to rob the safe, convincing a man named McKimmie to finance the preparations and recruiting a team to carry out the heist. Jean gets detailed floor plans of the casino and the specifications of the safe, and buys a bracelet for his wife, Suzanne, with some of the money he is paid for his services. The smitten Paolo brags to Anne about the upcoming raid to try to impress her. Not taking him seriously, she lets this information slip to Marc just before the two have sex. Earlier, Marc had been arrested by Ledru for beating up one of his prostitutes, but Ledru had released him on the condition that he provide some information on a bigger crime; Marc's reaction makes Anne realize she may have made a mistake. The next morning, Anne tells Bob what she did, and he and Roger search for Marc, but cannot find him before he is picked up by Ledru. Marc tells Ledru that he has heard about something involving Bob, but needs more time to get the details, so Ledru lets him go. When Paolo hears about Marc and Anne, he finds Marc and shoots the man dead just as he is about to tell Ledru what he was able to find out. While all of this is going on, Suzanne discovers the source of her husband's recent windfall and decides to blackmail Bob for a larger share of the take, but, unable to find him, instead anonymously tips off Ledru. Thinking that, with Marc dead, their plan is still a secret, Bob and his team head to Deauville. Ledru searches fruitlessly for Bob to convince him to abandon his plan before, dispirited, he leads a convoy of armed police to the casino. Bob enters the casino to check on things. The plan is that, unless he signals them otherwise, his team will burst in at 5:00 a.m. and rob the safe at gunpoint. He had promised Roger that he would not gamble until after the heist was over, but, after wandering around the tables for a while, he cannot resist placing a bet. Moving from

roulette Roulette is a casino game named after the French word meaning ''little wheel'' which was likely developed from the Italian game Biribi''.'' In the game, a player may choose to place a bet on a single number, various groupings of numbers, the ...

to chemin de fer, he has an incredible run of luck, winning millions, but loses track of the time. Just before 5:00, he finally looks at his watch. He orders the staff to cash his huge pile of chips and hurries out the door. The police arrive as Bob's team are walking toward the casino, and a brief shootout ensues. Bob comes upon the aftermath and holds Paolo as he dies. He and Roger are handcuffed and put into Ledru's car, and two employees of the casino put Bob's winnings in the trunk. Ledru says Bob will probably only spend a few years in prison for planning the robbery, but Roger says that, with a good lawyer, he may get acquitted. Bob, however, quips that he may even be able to claim

damages At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury. To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss. To be recognised at ...

Principal cast

Isabelle Corey Isabelle Corey (29 May 1939 – 6 February 2011) was a French actress and model. Corey started modeling in Paris in her teens for magazines such as ''Jardin des Modes'', ''Elle'' and ''Madame Figaro''. She was discovered in the Latin Quarter, wh ...

as Anne * Daniel Cauchy as Paolo *

as Bob Montagné *

Guy Decomble Guy Decomble (1910–1964) was a French film and television actor. A character actor he played in a number of supporting parts in postwar cinema. One of his better known roles is as the teacher in ''The 400 Blows'' by François Truffaut.Paietta ...

as Comissioner Ledru * André Garet as Roger * Gérard Buhr as Marc * Claude Cerval as Jean * Colette Fleury as Suzanne * René Havard as Inspector Morin * Simone Paris as Yvonne *

Howard Vernon Howard Vernon (15 July 1908 – 25 July 1996) was a Swiss actor. In 1961, he became a favorite actor of Spanish film director Jesús Franco and began starring in many low-budget horror and erotic films produced in Spain and France. After po ...

as McKimmie The voice of the narrator is that of Jean-Pierre Melville.

Production

The film was shot on location in

and Deauville, with two interiors filmed at Melville's own Studios Jenner. According to an interview, the film cost 17.5 million French francs to produce, though a CNC Censorship file includes an estimate of 32 million French francs.

Release

Released in Paris on 24 April 1956, ''Bob le flambeur'' took in 221,659 admissions in Paris and 716,920 admissions in France as a whole, and was Melville's lowest grossing film at that point in his career.

Critical reception

Vincent Canby Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...

, writing for ''The New York Times'' in 1981, noted that "Melville's affection for American gangster movies may have never been as engagingly and wittily demonstrated as in ''Bob le Flambeur,'' which was only the director's fourth film, made before he had access to the bigger budgets and the bigger stars (

Jean-Paul Belmondo Jean-Paul Charles Belmondo (; 9 April 19336 September 2021) was a French actor and producer. Initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s, he was a major French film star for several decades from the 1960s onward. His best known credits ...

Alain Delon Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon (; born 8 November 1935) is a French actor and filmmaker. He was one of Europe's most prominent actors and screen sex symbols in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, he won the César Award for Best Actor for h ...

) of his later pictures." The film received positive reviews when it was re-released by Rialto Pictures in U.S. cinemas in 2001.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

added it to his

Great Movies ''The Great Movies'' is the name of several publications, both online and in print, from the film critic Roger Ebert. The object was, as Ebert put it, to "make a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema." ''The Great Movies'' was pu ...

list in 2003. On

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...

, the film holds an approval rating of 97%, based on 30 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10; the website's critical consensus reads: "Majorly stylish, ''Bob le Flambeur'' is a cool homage to American gangster films and the presage to French New Wave mode of seeing."

Remake and influence

'' The Good Thief'', an English-language remake of the film written and directed by

Neil Jordan Neil Patrick Jordan (born 25 February 1950) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer. His first book, '' Night in Tunisia'', won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He won an Academ ...

, was released in 2002. ''Bob le flambeur'' also has influenced such films as the two versions of the American film ''

Ocean's Eleven ''Ocean's Eleven'' is a 2001 American heist comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay by Ted Griffin. The first installment in the ''Ocean's'' film trilogy, it is a remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film of the same name. The ...

'' (1960 and 2001) and

Paul Thomas Anderson Paul Thomas Anderson (born June 26, 1970), also known by his initials PTA, is an American filmmaker. He made his feature-film debut with '' Hard Eight'' (1996). He found critical and commercial success with ''Boogie Nights'' (1997) and received ...

's '' Hard Eight'' (1996).

References

Sources

External links

* * *
''Bob le flambeur''
an essay by

Lucy Sante Lucy Sante (formerly Luc Sante; born May 25, 1954) is a Belgium-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to ''The New York Review of Books''. Her books include '' Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York'' (1991) ...

at the

Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cine ...

"Bob le Flambeur", ''Senses of Cinema'', February 2003, Brian Frye
{{Jean-Pierre Melville 1956 films 1956 crime films Film noir Films about organized crime in France Films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville French black-and-white films Gambling films French gangster films French heist films Films set in Paris Films produced by Serge Silberman Films based on French novels 1950s heist films 1950s French-language films 1950s French films