© 2015 by James Clark
It wouldn’t seem plausible, from the perspective of bloated numbers pledging their allegiance to “commonsensible” understanding of the world in general and film in particular, that an approach to the whimsy of Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956) requires a brief update of the reflective history of the planet. But, when you stop and think about the flaming absurdity and mawkishness of mainstream (law-abiding) experience, it is precisely a disregarded figure like Melville (and his most acute contemporary associate, the much-maligned Michael Mann), who would be doing the heavy lifting so germane to the roster of geniuses who have left things in so self-satisfiedly superficial a state.
Incisive investigation tends to come in two forms. The first, stemming from 19th century idealist-academic inquiry (in turn stemming from pre-Socratic endeavors) comprises conceptual architecture having tripped open lacunae of the rational (Platonic) tradition. The second, stemming from the arts, comprises construction of physical objects in such a way as to reveal an underbelly of rewarding startlement that physical events can be endlessly compelling.
The arts having to do with that black magic have jealously maintained that those whiffs of ecstasy and frisson they trade in are to stand as sacrosanct in their ineffable and almost utterly confusing power. As such, in radical film production, the sensuous bite of malaise, impasse and fleeting thrill tends to stand out as an unsurpassable frontier unto itself.
But this now venerable electrical storm (along lines of Antonioni, Fellini, Bresson, Lynch, Von Trier et al.) does admit of being cultivated further. And the inception of this problematic peeks out of the well-trodden ground by way of a film feted for elegance, technical audacity and panache; but not recognized as a bold departure speaking to the heart of modern existence.
In fairness to the misinterpretation plastered all over this film, we have to acknowledge that our protagonist gives many indications, especially in the misadventure’s first half-hour or so, of being old-fashioned, in a way that is both stuffy and crazily inconsistent with his own unconventional habits. We first see him rolling dice at an all-night gambling den in the sex-trade Pigalle district of Montmartre, where he’s snubbed by Lady Luck and then, on trundling along the sidewalks in early morning light, scowling like an affronted Puritan in face of a young hooker’s buying into an American sailor’s invitation, “C’mon. C’mon, Baby. Want a ride on my bike?” During his stroll to ramp up the dignity quotient, we have seen passing by (on one occasion from the viewpoint of a top-floor atelier revealing a pretty little Parisian park with a pretty fountain, all the more enhanced by the overcast atmosphere and grainy black and white film texture) a sprinkler truck dealing as best it can with the night’s travesties, and there it is again during the impurity of that damn American. (A voice-over has remarked, during the slow scoping of the quartier prior to the introduction of the protagonist wedded to shine, “People pass one another, forever strangers… Working people, like the cleaning lady who is very late… [Very late, at 5 a. m.?! Very late, because the place no longer responds to the sanitizing of times gone by?!].) The early moments provide an unhurried selection of the facades and signage of interest at Place Pigalle. One, seen just before the scene at the craps table, particularly shows some bite: “Nus” (Nudes). Of course there is his being fleeced in the game (at a locale with checker-board patterns on both floor and walls). But the sense of the word that really delivers an impact is that of “uncovered,” “revealed.” In the film’s opening seconds the voice-over, furnished by Melville, broaches the wonders of Montmartre from the specific angle of “the strange story of Bob le Flambeur” [the High Roller]. It is the strangeness of this divided figure—his American/French moniker a puzzle in itself—which beckons, a presence we readily comprehend to be not about concepts but instead the carnal, volatile plunge of his progressions and therefore not a safe bet to be taken at face value. For instance, during his little ramble, he is struck by his appearance as beaming out from the glass of a shop window. He remarks, “A real hood’s face.” True, he’s sleep-deprived, his middle-aged bulkiness repels any sense of athleticism while his America film-noirish trench coat implies another game-face, something more physical than tossing dice and holding cards. But what does he mean by calling himself a hood?
Again on that constitutional, he’s spoken to as a friend by a cabbie waiting for a fare. (That he didn’t recognize Bob could imply some aging in effect.) And then, at a news-stand where he gives a tip, the little man putting in big hours says, “Thanks, Mr. Bob…” A police lieutenant en route to work in a chauffeured car hails him in a friendly way, “How are you doing?” The cop knows his regular haunts and offers to drive him to what is always the last destination of the wee small hours. (At the previous fleecing, he had begged off going onward to that place—momentarily prudent—and when the lieutenant asks him if he’ll be gambling Bob replies, “No, just to say hello.” He adds, “Not all the way [to the haunt]. Mustn’t ruin my reputation.” He does gamble and he does, once again, lose. A cut back (from his being such a sad sack) to the lieutenant and the two subordinates in the car has the newbies asking about that passenger and we learn that before the War Bob was not only a very successful thief but, at a point of his gang’s being interrupted by the cops during one of their jobs, he knocked aside the hand of one of his more violent associates, saving the future lieutenant getting shot. From that day they have been pals; but during that period Bob did serve time and he hasn’t returned to taking other people’s money. “Sure he was a hood. But age has wisened him up.”
There’s more to wisdom than desisting from theft. And this so elegantly launched narrative gets down to business in conveying in a most sophisticated way the rare discernment of a man seemingly just floundering. The moment of Bob’s heroics in saving the man who lived to become a lawman’s lawman was fixed in posterity as “The Triumph Case” (the nature of the triumph not yet discernible); but another famous escapade, that of the “Rimbaud Bank,” (which led to Bob’s captivity) serves as a compass of sorts. Proto-Surrealist poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), referred to as “a restless soul” (though perhaps enlisting more salty terminology) would be amongst the least likely personages in the country to have a bank named after him. But he would be a valid forerunner for the protagonist we shouldn’t rush to get straight. Returning home at last, he warns off his cleaning lady (more sanitation) that she needn’t come in as he needs uninterrupted sleep. He finds later that she has left him a meal and coffee and freshly laundered shirts (more loyal homage from the surround). He is in fact wakened by a pimp needing money to get out of town for a while due to his hospitalizing one of his employees. Bob fixes him with an angry hood’s glare and tells him, “I like to help guys in big trouble. But not your kind.” Then we find him at Yvonne’s “Heads or Tails” bar—an issue of vision sneaking in—a place we’ll eventually learn he has financed for her and where he has his own table to which he invites the teen-age hooker who has dropped by with a john whom he sends on his way and then likewise Marc the non-stop ladies’ man. He gives her a tongue-lashing about her choice of work, but he also buys her a dinner. Eventually he lets her stay at his place in hopes of keeping her off the streets; and, noticing the elegance of his decor, the regal dimensions of his floor-plan and his million-dollar-view of the Sacre Coeur Basilica, not to mention choice instances of decorative and fine art, she remarks, “Your family must be rich.” “I can’t complain,” he replies; but soon afterward he drives her to the house where he was born. “It wasn’t such a lousy dump back then,” he begins. But he frames his account of family life in such a way as to impress upon her that his family was not the source of his tasteful opulence. At the age of 14 he “split with [his] old lady” and went out “to conquer the world” [remaining, in fact, in Paris]; and then he returned 10 years later making an observation redolent of what he was up to during the absence. “I almost fell over the old lady scrubbing the floor. I’d always seen her on all fours. That’s how I recognized her. I ran for it, without a word! I started sending her money orders.” The basis, out there to see, of Bob’s generosity of spirit consists of an iron will not to be on all fours, to, that is, see the mountain (Bob’s last name is Montagne) of intimidation the world presents and beat it with physical verve and wit. His choice of career, grand theft and larceny, reflects a sense of the mainstream as the enemy. His genteel style of proceeding with that dicey métier brings to the fore a second opinion (this time benign) derived from the gratifications of mastery. But the even more dicey métier of telling wit (which is to say, a polyphonic wit) can make a fool of the best of them. Bob is a high-roller, sort of.
Right on the heels of this disclosure that there is a hardness to softie Bob (a hardness now confined to the dangerous chaos of gambling), two of Bob’s closest associates appear—Roger, a pre-War hood and Paolo, a young punk foisted off on our protagonist as a piece of work by his father who was also a member of the gang. Paolo mentions Bob’s very noticeable care for the trappings of American gangster movies. (We first see him in a light-colored trench coat; there is more to come.) Roger, one of his many sycophant fans, goes overboard with the claim that in fact Bob influenced the style of American gangster movies. (Bob’s thriving upon a heady sweetness about Parisian ways would never have flown in America.) The in fact very palpable post-incarceration resort to noir Americana is at the farthest depths of his transitional sensibility. Bringing to his place the promiscuous young girl, Anne, the disarray of her energies being a sort of time bomb showing up within an already compromised workplace, Bob is a vision in his lovely Packard convertible with the cute, risqué passenger. Oddly and pointedly, his philanthropic and movie star sheen is momentarily upstaged by a noisy clunker just ahead—a vehicle unmistakably redolent of that Jacques Tati the first of whose films, Jour de Fete (1949) featured a rural postman in thrall to post-War American ways and having a hard time not looking ridiculous. That Bob is far more poised than that bicycle-dependent postman puts in place, by way of complementing the physical presence of actor, Roger Duchesne, playing the protagonist, the sense that far more complex aspirations are in play. That his time-bomb bombshell up front with him reminds us of lethal Lily whom convertible fancier and shady Private Eye, Mike Hammer, is suckered into sheltering at his girlfriend’s apartment in Bob Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) opens another, more far-reaching affinity.
During his update to Paolo as to Bob’s mystique Roger maintains that his gang seldom deployed guns and never had them loaded. (The near thing with the about-to-be lieutenant being a case of loading in an emergency?) This would hardly be a model for gun-crazy America. But it does make clear that the shady business then had to do with a population where crime would be more on the order of Mike and girlfriend Velda’s profit centre concerning schemes leading to legal advantages in divorce clashes—errant but meting out difficulties to self-evidently odious people. (Bob not only has that minty convertible but his parking garage includes a diminutive, talkative repair man.) The course of the narrative brings to its surface those who recall that someone like Bob could be a boon and those like Paolo and Anne and many more to come, who are hard as nails and require rhythms of trumping them that Bob still doesn’t have in his playbook. What he does have is the albeit tarnished resonant charm of Paris where his former mojo still makes some sense (particularly as bankrolled by a bygone criminal economy), while a new hybrid is clearly a must. Bob is an avatar of being a hood (a soldier of fortune) in a context that wants you on all fours; and along with that he wants close contact with a coterie of those who share his lively traces of resilience and aristocratic generosity. For Bob the Pigalle gambling tables are equipment for a nightly routine in hopes of igniting Something Big, a fusion which he once had a purchase upon. (His slot machine in the entrance closet would be a surreal medicine cabinet, offering pills far beyond their best-date point.) That handsome store of other people’s money is, at the era when we catch up to him, about to read empty. (His complaining to Paolo about the wicked hands his card conquerors are fortunate to hold shows him to be capable of adolescent bitching.)
Mike Hammer’s favorite club/bar was the Pigalle. A year later the Paris Pigalle tract becomes Bob’s haunt. Both stylish figures are well liked in those zones sharing the same name. In Kiss Me Deadly, the place is a launch for the protagonist (explicitly in need of Something Big) getting a cue to avert Velda’s being murdered. In Bob le Flambeur, there is, in markedly different tone—intuitive tone being an indispensable factor here—a dynamic objective that hasn’t happened for a long while. This drift of intent is intensified by a series of scenes pertaining to his overseeing, with fussy advice and gawking, Paolo and Anne’s trite liaison and his becoming a desultory wanderer in an urban setting that could yield treasure; but no longer does. (The domestic slot machine, a fixture of their tryst, which Paolo pops prior to bedding Anne, gives off a metallic aural aura well capturing the bankruptcy yawning ever more closely to the once-so-solvent master of his craft.) Pulling himself back to some semblance of a high-roller concerning intentional competence, rather than passive addiction, he resolves to plunge his last “700 clams” on a horse race, realizing that such a moment of truth can bring him back (somehow) from being on all fours. Along with Roger he comes to Longchamps (Open Fields) and during the race he’s as cool as can be—all his liquid assets flashing by and he keeps his eyes on the primal open fields and he keeps his mouth shut. A cut to him and his friend cashing in the winnings shows allowance for a calm smile. Just as Mike could be so right and so wrong almost in the same breath, Bob declares, “I’m on a roll. I can’t stop now!” He had dismissed Roger’s shocked protest about the reckless plunge of his wealth with, “Fortune favors the bold.” But on returning broke to his friend who had stayed outside of the sink hole at the seemingly now more apt Deauville casino, remaining in the convertible listening to American dance band music, he first posits, “Yeah, I’m cleaned out. Big deal… I had some excuse being this dumb when I was a kid!” Roger, in a rare bearing of his heart, tells his hero, “I feel sorry for you. You’re such a sucker! You should be ashamed!” Bob adds, “True, I’ve screwed up my life.”
With all the cards on the table now, there commences a closing action tipping into fantasy; but fantasy in recognition that, sucker though he is, Bob has on his hands a misadventure too blue-chip to be snuffed out and requiring of the viewer serious revisiting and anticipation of the perhaps more acutely engaged harshness of subsequent instalments (by Melville and by far-flung associates, like Mann). Roger had not always shunned the Deauville casino. In fact he had had an experience there not long before Bob’s kids’ stuff. Bumping into Jean, a former gang associate, now drawing a salary as a croupier for the establishment, Roger learns from him that there’s a big payoff to be had on the night of the Grand Prix car race—800 million francs, locked away in the casino safe. At the time of hearing of this, sensible Roger regards it as a pipe dream and death trap. But in face of Bob’s losing it, he runs it past his friend, for what it’s worth. A swirling musical expression suffuses the protagonist who had run out of initiatives. “The job of a lifetime!” he enthuses. “It can be done if it’s planned right…”
The course of an old smoothie trying to take his act into a newly abrasive world gathers up a remarkable flood of considerations as fresh as today. In finding those sweet streets to be very mean streets, Bob Montagne gets down to his objective of becoming Bob Aldrich. And what’s Bob Aldrich in his finest hour without Pandora’s Box? There is a detailed negotiation as to the nature of the locking systems of the casino’s safe; and then there is a lengthy training process for Roger to attain to opening the formidable challenge in two minutes. (Here is the source of Mann’s affair with cracking vaults which entails both sublime fruition and crass rot.) Newly galvanized Bob can’t, it seems, avoid being part of Tati’s mockery of self-important modernity (which does, however, have its valid side). “We’ll operate like a commando outfit!” he declares, and quixotically puts his troopers through a rigorously timed sequence of manoeuvres on a giant floor plan of the casino chalked out on the barrens at a defunct industrial centre. Some industrial interference with Bob’s dream soon oozes to the surface. The croupier whose remark sets this tightly bound delirium on its way has a wife being a huge piece of work. In the first place, regarding her husband doing inside-job duties, she is anxious about their now straight life being terminated. Then she is all about nailing the schemers for more money. Not getting satisfaction, she calls the lieutenant. But someone else has called him earlier—a whole network of subversion having been easily activated. Anne had been stung by Bob’s being sweet and generous but not prepared to fall for her or to assume the all-fours role of Sugar Daddy. Her pique, though confined to quick glances and tones of voice out of Bob’s range, does surface ambiguously in her calling his beloved Packard a “jalopy.” He had warned, “Don’t hang around Montmartre. You’ll end up being a sidewalk princess;” but she was confident that she could land a sucker and dine far higher on the food chain than that. Her landing a job at a night club exposes her to men far more affluent than Paolo, who, to regain her favor, can’t resist exposing to her his trump card of being in on a killing that will net him a million. The industrial design motif of checkerboard walls and floors, apparent in Roger’s office where the initial preparation for the heist takes place, has, from the early moments, impressed upon us an environment essentially locked into advantageous calculations in lieu of more complex, less personally driven, procedures. Amidst this spike in self-serving preoccupation, along comes one-track Marc running past her the idea of his pimping for her, and she tells him that Paolo and his big deal will eclipse anything he could furnish. Marc had been hauled in by the lieutenant to become an informer, failing which he’d be jailed for his unruly episode with the hooker he claimed having to leave town about. (He felt it was enough to tell the suddenly more complex cop [and how, like Heat’s Vince, could he not be, in this context?]—“I was in a bad mood” [when I beat her up].) Anne’s information about the heist puts the moody one at an advantage. She has some second thoughts, looks up Bob at that place with a name becoming more compelling by the minute, namely, Tails and Heads, and spills the caffeinated beans. She gets a slap on the kisser by the guy she wants to bleed over the long term (but also wants to breathe in his surreal after-shave, an aura taking a slow turn toward essential callousness toward the world at large, recalling Mann’s Neil’s 30-second brush-off); Bob goes on to dress down Paolo who in turn tracks down Marc and exterminates him in the very process of confirming the heist; two carloads of Paris police interrupt the gang’s move on that big house about to melt down, Paolo is shot as dead as Marc; Bob comes over to the punk’s last moments and, though making the sombre gesture, he is far from shattered. He’d won a ton at the tables during the vigil as to the arrival of the 5 a.m. top-off to add up to 800 million, an episode (however improbable) giving us a fix upon his potential elevation to the stature of graceful monarch. Thus he is seen being handcuffed, the lieutenant (who had staged a desperate effort to divert his friend, visiting all the haunts and who had pulled strings to be the presiding official, not some federal tight-ass) telling him, “OK, asshole…” Then the blithe, not meant to be believable as such, look ahead clicks in: an army of casino attendants marches out with armloads of cash; in the police car back to the station the cop notes, “With a good lawyer, you’ll be out in 3 years;” Bob adds, “With a top lawyer, I could get damages!”
Melville has emphasized the 24-carat quality of the core of Bob’s deliberations, not his actual accomplishment or the deadly side of his failing miserably. During the run-up to the heist, paced frenetically by jump cuts, Yvonne, with a register of simple, attentive care so remote from the wobble of the principal players (two Pigalle ballroom dance vignettes pepper this slide, the out of sync, zombie listing coming from the essence of an omnipresent alarming deterioration), looks him straight in the eye and tells him, “Instead of risking your neck, if you need money let me help. If you are arrested you’d never last inside. You’re no kid anymore…” Bob holds her hand and looks at her with sincere affection. Yvonne’s face is sad and anxious. An abrupt cut from that moment finds him at the club where Anne has been promoted to a “hostess,” in fact part of a foursome at a table generating overpriced champagne. “Care to dance?” he asks her; and as they do so Bob complains that Paolo is upset that she’s neglecting him. (I guess the regal topspin, however faint, induces in him a sort of neighborhood priest.) At a later date he’ll go on, after slapping her face for blowing their cover, to leave his key with Yvonne to serve as a safety net should she become hard pressed. Though the upsurge of the mission does lead him to an increase of cool hardness he is still at sea with Anne. He had told Roger on the way to Longchamps. “She’s no thoroughbred but she’s hot to trot.” But the lead-plated bitch to which her commonness had evolved—she responds to his care for Paolo with, “Poor thing. He’ll end up believing what he says”—represents a level of deadliness he has only begun to factor in. (Later films will get down to those brass tacks.) The little contretemps starting with her, “If I ever need your place” [again]? and then his, “Not while Paolo’s still fond of you,” segues into his holding her close on the dance floor. Then he snaps out of it (sort of) saying, “I gotta go. You can go back to your steamroller.” And her face becomes a hard smile.
Along with the many ominous touches recalling Bob Aldrich (including: as Paris Bob wends his way home that first early morning, the arresting glimpse of a woman running at top speed right past and beyond a black sedan stationed along the street), there is, as mentioned, the comedic/satiric matters of Jacques Tati. That the actor playing Bob’s friend (sharing the same 36 for an address—36 Quai des Orfevres being the site of the Paris Police Headquarters), Guy Decomble, also appears in Tati’s Jour de Fete (as a carnie with a roving eye), is, I think, an indicator of the true roll (unlike Bob’s largely illusory roll) Melville was on during the realization of this arrestingly significant project.
“Fate will have its way,” Melville’s voice-over intones as the two forces speed to the Deauville casino. The purchase upon finessing the affair with Pandora’s Box (and its 800 million kicker) has, with the amusing twist of the narrative, been confirmed in an oblique way. Bob’s being a bit of a fool for Anne suggests he’s not going far, regardless of the Alpha lawyer he can afford. The first night of gambling comes to a moment when someone pronounces, “full house.” The reference had nothing specific to do with Bob’s level of handiwork. On leaving the craps table he walks by a vibes player who had been jamming all night and was now on his own, quietly thrilling to a state of polymorphic solitude. This musician’s melancholy and resilient motif courses through many of the subsequent scenes. As established by this juxtaposition, we begin recognize that our protagonist/gadabout has allowed to atrophy the vast, powerful and indispensible gambit of aloneness. Bob berates Paolo for living in run-down conditions. “…it’s enough to give you the blues…” The theme song of Mike’s cataclysmic dare is called, “Rather Have the Blues” [than what I’ve got], an ironic perspective on someone, like Bob, who, when all is said and done, chickens out. Therewith, however, the song shows leeway for a situation of the surreal which has been rather paradoxically launched in LA, not Paris. The newly tough Bob would blackmail Jean into playing along with extra dimensions of his scheme. Thereby our protagonist hits another radioactive emission (Jean being the gentle enthusiast/postman in Jour de Fete). On driving to the home of the financier of their attack, a home situated in a horse farm, we see in a flash how self-sparing (but at the same time how more imaginative) he is apt to be as compared with the protagonist of The Asphalt Jungle (1950). The lieutenant beats Marc over the head with the blackmail so ready to hand to a police force working against the likes of Anne. “That’s the new law, buddy!” It’s a slippery terrain and Bob is, for all his sweet virtues, very ill equipped for it. Paolo was filled with that dread of “new law” (requiring, as Mann, in his close homage to Melville well knows, a hardly imaginable ruthless factor of loving circulation) in his close encounter with Anne’s savage priorities. “It’s as if you don’t care about anything…” (Bob and the lieutenant’s tete-a-tete in the squad car about the score comes in for a more intensive rendition in the battle of wits between Vince and Neil in Heat.) As already reported, Melville tells us during his guided tour of Place Pigalle at the outset, “People pass each other, forever strangers.” Yes. But it is the much more than that which propels Melville’s work to follow—and Mann’s.
