The international transactions involved in "Bob le Flambeur" are mind-boggling. It is French. It is film noir. The French made up the term "film noir." However, they made it up to describe American pictures, which, in "Bob le Flambeur," they are imitating – although those American pictures were probably influenced by a French sensibility.
Let's run through that again: it's a French imitation of an American picture that is described by a term created by the French to describe other American pictures that were influenced by the French. It's very French. It's also very American. Maybe this is where globalization started, way back in 1955!
Something of a cult item, Jean-Pierre Melville's film is a sleek evocation of the Paris demimonde in the mid-'50s, a time and place where everybody looked cool, wasn't friendly and smoked a lot. Yes, I know: that's Paris in 2001. I suppose the difference is the hats and trench coats, which figure prominently in this French noir as they did in American noirs of the time.
The film, in a ravishing new print, hauls its considerable legend to the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center through Wednesday. It's a cool-cat caper flick, said to have influenced Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless," particularly with its amoral heroine who just gives guys up without a twitch of remorse, à la Jean Seberg in Godard's flick. But in its time, "Bob le Flambeur" was clearly influenced by "The Asphalt Jungle," John Huston's great caper flick, and about, oh, 500 other American films.
Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a slick old "high roller" – le Flambeur – with Mitchum's eyes and Bogart's clothes and Fred McMurray's ties. Alas, he has Bob Barker's hair. He knows everybody and prowls the night streets of Montmartre from high-stakes poker game to high-stakes poker game, sucking on a cigarette as if it's a breathing apparatus, driving a big American two-tone convertible and just generally acting cool, looking cool, being cool. You can tell he's cool: Wherever he goes, they're playing le jazz hot.
He's a kind of ambassador-without-portfolio of the crime world, decidedly nonviolent, too hip to sweat or become visibly upset. He calls chicks "kid" and won't sleep with them on general principle, although he will help them. He helps Anne (Isabelle Corey), who is young, beautiful and rather disconnected from humanity. He finds her wandering the streets; we're never sure if she's a hooker or a college girl who's read too much Sartre. Her lazy passivity and to-die-for body make her the erotic center of the picture, and arouse Bob's noblesse oblige: He gets her placed in a nightclub as a flower girl, he finds her a boyfriend, he chases away a pimp.
Alas, when Bob, running low on dough, gets an inside tip on a big payday at a casino in Deauville and decides to take a big chance, that pimp finds out about it through Anne.
So basically, as the movie unreels in its low-key black and white, calling up the satiny allure of the Parisian world of petty crime, it watches three forces: Bob and his pals planning a heist, the pimp betraying it, and the cops trying to outguess Bob.
There's another force at play, too: The universe, which always has a trick or two up its sleeve. And so when the big action goes down at the end, the universe provides an irony to turn everything on its head with a nice, existential thud.
Great picture? No. Cool picture? Oui. Not as good, I must say, as the sort of thing we moron yanks were doing on our own over here – "D.O.A." is much better; so are, of course, "Asphalt Jungle" and "The Big Heat" and "Kiss Me Deadly" – but très amusant, nevertheless.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR (PG, 97 minutes) – contains mild '50s evocations of sex and violence. At the AFI.
