Jean-Pierre Melville | Bob le Flambeur (Bob, the Gambler) / 1956, USA 1959

two sides of a coin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Auguste Le Breton and Jean-Pierre Melville (screenplay), Jean-Pierre Melville (director) Bob le Flambeur (Bob, the Gambler) / 1956, USA 1959

 

To describe Bob le Flambeur as a gangster film, which many critics and film dictionaries have, is a bit like describing the musical Guys and Dolls as a film noir. Yes, Bob, the gambler, twenty years before the film begins, has been involved in a robbery; he has even served time in prison. But the dapper gambler, friend of the chief of police, seems far more like a character out of Damon Runyon's head than having sprung from any of the American gangster movies which Melville so loved.

     If Bob (Roger Duchesne), is a "hood," as he describes himself, he is also, as the narrative voice-over tells us, an "old young man," a figure out of the old school who has a sentimental heart and is beloved by the inhabitants of the Montmartre underworld he frequents. He is a kind of angel in the midst of hell—Melville establishing the heaven and hell dichotomy of the Paris district in the first few frames of the film. Not only do his friends, waitresses, and waiters admire him, but Bob, having an established reputation as a "gentleman," has a young acolyte, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy); and early in the story Bob takes in a young woman, Anne (Isabelle Corey), not for sex but to save her from becoming a "pavement princess," a woman of the streets controlled by men such as the pimp Marc (Gérard Buhr). Unlike all the others of his world, he lives in relative comfort, with a daily housekeeper to care for him.

      Yet Bob has a problem: he is an inveterate gambler, who in the first few frames of film, bets away his bankroll and is faced with a wave of bad luck. How can he resist, accordingly, the temptation when a compatriot safe-cracker reports that he has been told that the Casino in Deauville sometimes contains over 800 million francs?

     With cool precision, Bob proceeds in his preparation for the robbery, Melville delighting in the methodical process of planning a successful heist. Finding a backer in McKimmie (Howard Vernon), an inside man in the croupier, Jean (Claude Cerval), and employing the services of Paolo and other thugs, the gambler brilliantly takes us through the rehearsals: an early version of cracking the safe, a later, more sophisticated version of safe-cracking involving earphones and an oscilloscope, a walk-through of the planned robbery in a field where every aspect of the casino is outlined in chalk, even a pep talk. No coach could have better practiced his team.

     But these men, including Bob, are, after all, only humans. And one by one, they crack—not the safe—but psychologically. For in this basically misogynistic film, women are the enemy. And despite his salvation of Anne, it is quite clear that Bob prefers to live without women and work with men.

     Bill Thompson has noted in his commentary on Bill’s Movie Emporium: “The reason the men suffer the fate they do is because they are willing to keep their women in the background, or in one case not include them in their life.” But that fate, in the instance or our hero, at least, is survival, and a life lived as a local king, along with the payoff of cute boys like Paolo looking up to him. If you can’t precisely describe Bob as a homosexual, his titular role as “gentleman” at least aligns him with the old school of the “unmarrying kind,” a man who knew that women and gambling were simply not a good mix. In this case, part of his allure is precisely his abandonment of sex. Bob’s pleasures are primarily the same as his daily activities, the chance-taking games he plays with life.

    As for those who can’t do without their women, they quickly find that sex, with its necessities of social and communicative living, easily does them in. Having fallen in love with Anne, Paolo tells her about Deauville, and she, in turn, spills the beans to the local pimp, Marc, from whom Bob has saved her and who has saved his own neck by promising the police he will give them "information." Then there is the croupier's social-climbing wife, Suzanne. Even the faithful bartender, Yvonne (Simone Paris), sensing something's up, expresses her worries about Bob and his plans. Even after Marc is killed by Paolo, Suzanne and Jean get word to the police. The inevitable collapse of Bob and his cohorts’ world seems about to happen.

     But in Melville's films, just as in Damon Runyon's writings, everyone generally stays true to his type. And once Bob is left alone in the canyons of casino gambling, he simply cannot resist doing what he has done all of his life: gamble. This time, however, he wins, again, again, and again, taking home a fortune almost as big as the one he might have stolen.

     The inevitable does occur. The heist is foiled by the police, Paolo shot and killed—he has, after all, been the only one in the film who has actually used a gun; Bob uses weapons only as symbols, not as tools of destruction. Poker-faced even after holding the dead body of a boy that might be described as his son—and we might add, the being he comes in this film, to expressing his love—Bob cites the mantra of any gambler: "He knew there are always two sides of a coin."

     Bob is arrested along with his cohorts, but his friend, the head of police suggests he will get only four years since he has not actually been on the scene for the robbery itself. Bob, however, has a better wager: with a good lawyer he might get away with no prison time at all. And he now has a fortune to gamble away for the rest of his life.

     Melville's thoroughly loveable villain has been saved simply by being true to himself.

    Although Melville was married from 1952 until his death in 1973, he was observed by friends to prefer the company of men with whom he would sit up late at night discussing cinema. And it surely to no coincidence that in serving in the French Resistance during World War II, he chose the code name Melville after this favorite US author, Herman Melville, a bi-sexual married man. He kept the name as his own for the rest of his life. And like Herman Melville’s works, if Jean-Pierre Melville’s films are not precisely homosexual, they focus on homo-social and often homoerotic situations.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012).