Daily Blague

This afternoon, I watched Bob le flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 marvel, starring Roger Duchesne. More varied in tone that Touchez pas au grisbi, a film that Jacques Becker made the year before with Jean Gabin, it is equally saturated by the taciturn, American swagger of its leading men - both of whom drive big American cars. Bob is so American-accented, in fact, that it's difficult to believe that Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have remade it had he a few years longer.

I wonder if an American who hadn't seen very much French cinema would see what I'm talking about. In France, "taciturn" means three or four words for every one that an American gangster would utter. And everyone is very well turned out. In his first scenes, Bob is heading home after a night gambling, and he looks pretty rumpled, but from then on he's always sharp. His hair is perfectly combed, his ties are beautifully knotted, and he glows with well-being even when his fortunes take a turn for the worse. Most of his colleagues, such as his partner, Roger (André Garet), and his friend le commissaire Ledru (Guy Decomble) are scruffier, in a Gallic way, but they're never grubby or oafish. Nobody is overweight.

Then there is the pace of the film, which betrays a tie with the silents that Hollywood had put completely behind it twenty years early. The pacing is slightly too fast; dialogue is exchanged with the brio of a tennis match, even when it is not at all witty. It's as though the characters don't stop to think what they say. The soundtrack is also, from an American standpoint, nothing less than bizarre, shifting schizophrenically between the tinkling gaiety of Montmartre's boîtes to portentousness worthy of Bernard Herrmann, and with a dispatch that, for anyone not actually watching, sounds deranged. It took the French cinema longer to abandon the old idea that every movie ought to have something for everyone.

But it is pretty easy to see the American dreams that this film must have hinted at to French audiences. Bob is free with his money, but quietly, always for generous and never for ostentatious purposes. He cares very much - more than he ought to, perhaps - for his protégé, Paulo (Daniel Cauchy), and for Anne (Isabelle Corey), the streetwalker whom he takes under his wing but releases without protest when Paulo takes an interest in her. In a very American way, Bob is too disciplined and mature to get mixed up with women in any complicated way, and one suspects that, if he did have a girlfriend, it would one along the lines of Max's well turned-out American in Grisbi.

The climax of the film is not what you're led to expect. In a touch that might have inspired Ronald Neame's wonderful Gambit (1966; inexcusably out of print), the big heist that Bob has planned is presented "as he expected it to go" - in other words, without a hitch. This scene is not labored, however, and it turns out to be a rehearsal of nothing. Instead of the heist, we have Bob at the Deauville tables, raking in winnings and still more winnings - on this fatal night, his luck has changed. The inconstant mood of the film gives no real assurance as to what sort of ending to expect (id est, dead or alive), and I don't want to spoil the movie even if I can't imagine why anyone would be reading this without having seen. I'll just say that the last three lines are increasingly droll, and the last one downright clever, a genuine touché!

I put off watching Bob le flambeur for years, thinking that it must be just another gangster movie with a bloodbath at the end. But it's not. It's a fascinating appropriation of American possibilities by French manners.