“When he walks up the rue Pigalle at the beginning of the film, it's in front of a rusty mirror that Bob mutters to himself: ‘A fine hoodlum face!' With this one phrase, he sums up his entire life.” With this one reference to the opening of Bob le Flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville marks himself as one of the cinema's great modernists - heir to the American film noir and acknowledged forerunner to the French New Wave. (Godard honored him in his first feature, Breathless, casting him as the celebrated writer behind the dark glasses.)
Bob le Flambeur is Melville's love poem to Paris' Pigalle and its lowlife denizens. It is a gangster film that is turned by Melville's taste for the absurd into what he calls “a comedy of manners,” albeit cast in the shades of gray of the pure policier. “I like futility of effort,” Melville says. “The uphill road to failure is a very human thing.... Even so, Bob is still a light-hearted film, (one which) ends on a pirouette....”
Roger Duchesne is featured as Bob, the aging safecracker who lives by night and sleeps by day in Montmartre; who thrives on his nostalgia for the pre-war gangster milieu (before the infiltration of the Gestapo upset the delicate balance between cop and criminal); who takes in stray youngsters such as Isabelle Corey and Daniel Cauchy; and who begins to feel his age when the blank-faced girl sleeps with his “adopted son” with more nonchalance than even Bob himself can affect.
“(Bob is) the ingratiating bad guy whose blasé air masks an unswerving, if idiosyncratic, code of ethics....” comments Stephen Harvey (Museum of Modern Art). The film, likewise, “is deceptively offhanded...an irresistible vision of extraordinary events unfolding amidst the most seemingly unremarkable of circumstances.” (JB)