Bob Le Flambeur / Un Flic
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Film Description
Features Bob Le Flambeur and Un Flic. Melville takes American themes and settings and transplants them to Paris for a uniquely Gallic take on film noir and cop movies.
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Review by Pasquale Iannone
on 1st March 2005
With Bob Le Flambeur (1956), director Jean Pierre Melville achieved a perfect synthesis of the documentary, American film noir and pre-war French poetic realism.
Melville had written the screenplay for his fourth feature back in 1950 but opted for a complete rewrite after having been struck by the originality and freshness of John Huston’s benchmark heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Huston’s was a film Melville unfailingly called ‘a masterpiece’ and one he often cited as a major influence on his own work. He decided to reshape Bob Le Flambeur into a light-hearted underworld comedy of manners. The film does however retain a tangible aura of fatalism, reflecting the typically Hustonian (and Melvillian) theme of the ‘uphill road to failure’.
Bob ‘the gambler’ (Roger Duchesne) is an elegant, retired bank robber who, after a run of bad luck, decides to plan a raid on the casino at Deauville. The scene is set for a stern test of Bob’s own morality in a tightly structured story of double-crosses, sudden violence and death. It is with this landmark film that Melville sets the thematic template for the rest of his body of work. Despite the fact that, aesthetically, each of his following films become progressively more austere, there is no doubt that from Le Doulos (1962) to L’Armée des Ombres (1969) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) various key themes introduced in Bob Le Flambeur reappear, uniting his entire oeuvre.
Melville described the film as simply his own ‘love-letter to Paris’, but the status of Bob Le Flambeur in the history of French cinema is particularly unique. It serves as an essential bridge between the tough, romantic, poetic realism of Carné or Duvivier and the vibrant, improvisational freshness of early Truffaut or Godard.
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