The influence of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is hard to miss. For those whose first introduction to the “heist movie” was the Steven Soderberg/George Clooney Ocean’s movies, Melville’s film will seem very familiar but it will also be something of a revelation. While the Ocean’s films are entertaining (though subject to the law of diminishing returns) there is a sense of stiff formality to the way they meet the genre’s plot points, as if they want to pay their respects to tradition but are anxious to move on to other things. Bob Le Flambeur, perhaps because it got there first, feels much looser in the way that it approaches the mechanics of the operation and even looking at it from the perspective of 2009, when the elements of the film are so familiar that they’ve become part of the collective film consciousness, it still seems fresh and new.

Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a gambler and ex-con who has managed to stay out of trouble for a number of years. He’s a legend in the neighbourhood and a mentor, of sorts, to Paolo (Daniel Cauchy) who, despite his status as a con, is somewhat naïve in terms of how he deals in the underworld. He trusts the wrong people and Bob takes it upon himself to pull Paolo out of situations that clearly spell trouble for him. Little does he know that he’ll be the one who facilitates Paolo’s ultimate fall.

Just as Bob hits a run of bad luck that takes him down to his last few dollars, he learns through a friend that the casino in Deauville has vast amounts of cash just waiting to be plucked by an enterprising thief. Bob goes about putting together a team, which includes Paolo and Roger (Andre Garet), a safecracker, as well as the croupier, whose help is essential to the plan’s success. They formulate their plan, mapping out their moves and signals, and Roger practices for cracking the safe, which will have to be done very quickly for the plan to work. The scenes of involving preparations for the heist are the best, managing to be serious without sacrificing charm, and fun without crossing into being silly. The putting together the crew and formulating the plan scenes have been emulated in numerous other heist movies but that familiarity somehow doesn’t detract at all from seeing it here. There is still some essential magic to the scenes constructed by Melville which makes it easy to see why this film continues to inform others some fifty years later.

Like most crime movies, Bob Le Flambeur is a very masculine film. Its large canvass of characters is predominantly male and it is a film very much concerned with the construction of male gender roles and with relationships between men. Bob, as he is portrayed in the film, is a man to be emulated not just because he looks good and knows how to pull off a con, but also because he knows how to command the respect of other men and, importantly, how to deal with women. His advice to Paolo is to never let a woman in on a con, which is exactly what Paolo does, to the detriment of the heist’s success. Paolo falls head over heels for Anne (Isabelle Corey), despite all evidence that she’ll go in with any guy who can keep her off the streets for a night or two. Bob is the one who initially takes Anne in – platonically – but Paolo steals her away and then tells her everything about the plan, which she then repeats to a rival conman who owes a debt to the police. Though Bob obviously has some affection for her – even after things go sour – he would never have put himself in a position to be double-crossed by her. Because Paolo is still in many ways just a boy play-acting as a man, he’s vulnerable to her and desperate to impress her with his daring. Of course the person Paolo really wants to impress is Bob and his hero-worship of him might be read as a latent crush, further emphasizing that Paolo is not a “real” man according to the dictates of the film’s gender constructs.

In terms of the larger context of film history, Bob Le Flambeur is something of a transitional film. It has elements of noir which dictate the direction the story will go, and the ways that characters will relate to each other, and it is clearly influenced by American gangster movies, but it is also considered as a precursor to the French New Wave movement which would change the course of filmmaking on both sides of the Atlantic. You could watch it back-to-back with an American noir like Out of the Past (of all noir heroes Bob reminds me most of Jeff Bailey, played with considerable aplomb by Robert Mitchum) or with Godard’s Breathless, and it fits in easily with both. In hindsight it seems to have been exactly the right movie at exactly the right time and yet it has that special something that keeps it from being rooted in time. Seen today the film is just as slick and clever as it was in 1956, which is the real testament to Melville’s skill as a storyteller. This is the kind of movie for which the term “classic” was invented.

Watch a segment from the film here: