After losing big, an aging gambler decides to assemble a team to rob a casino.
EN
“The French have made some first-class crime pictures, which Americans have been given too few opportunities to see. Luckily, we have Bob le Flambeur [Bob the Gambler], one of the greatest caper movies in any language. Non-Francophones might not understand its crackling and untranslatable slang dialogue by Auguste le Breton, who also wrote the incomparable Rififi, but they will feel its rhythm, which is sufficient. And the picture was directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who might as well have invented the French crime movie. Melville—his real last name was Grumbach, his pseudonym an homage to the author of Moby Dick—started making films right after World War II, independent of the studios, working on a shoestring, on location and without stars. Alone of all the French filmmakers of the 1950s, he made pictures entirely on his own terms. His example let the incipient New Wavers know that such a thing was possible.”
[…]
Even if you allow for the Frenchness of the enterprise, what you have here is an underworld bearing about the same relation to historical reality as the settings of most Westerns—a place that came into fully-imagined being only in retrospective view. And as with the top rank of Westerns, you’d be a fool to quibble. Its story, setting, and characters may have been shaped by fond and wishful recollection, but there is not a breath of falsehood about Bob le Flambeur. Its tenderness is every bit as strong as its dramatic irony, and its romance can outshoot any lesser picture’s cynicism.”
Lucy Sante1
“I don’t know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won’t even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time, there will be nothing but television. Well, I would be happy if I got one line in the Great Universal Encyclopedia of the Cinema, and I think that’s the sort of ambition every filmmaker must have.”
Jean-Pierre Melville2
- 1Lucy Sante, “Bob le flambeur,” The Criterion Collection, 15 April 2002.
- 2Jean-Pierre Melville cited in: Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville, (New York: Viking Press, 1972).