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"Bob le Flambeur" opens with a breathtaking conceit. The camera watches a cable car descend from the beautiful church of Montmartre's Sacr茅 Coeur to the seedy red light district of Pigalle.
As the voiceover narrator styles it, this is a journey from Parisian heaven to the back street hell where the tale of Bob the gambler will unfold.
Obsessed with the American film noirs of the 40s, director Jean-Pierre Melville spent the best part of his career recreating the classic noir world - back street bars, women of ill repute, and violent hustlers - with a distinctive Gallic flavour.
But in "Bob le Flambeur" and the later "Le Samoura茂" (in which Alain Delon plays an existential hit man), he went far beyond mere imitation. He plays with the conventions of the genre with a masterful touch, creating something altogether new.
As the aging, broke, and broken gambler who decides to make one last bid for financial security by robbing a casino, Bob (Roger Duchesne) is the archetypal film noir hero - a world-weary urban loner.
Yet as soon as he's established this character, Melville breaks with convention, showing us the soft underbelly of this hardboiled hero through his relationships with young sidekick Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), damsel in distress Ana (Isabelle Corey), and police inspector Ledru (Guy Decomble).
Although he sets up the heist with all the meticulous detail of Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" (released a year later), Melville's actually more interested in his central character's gentlemanly heroics and fractured obsession with risking everything at the roulette table.
Addicted to games of chance, Bob is ultimately revealed to be an unlikely candidate for a gangster, gambling everything to win - and lose - in the film's deliciously ironic climax.
In French with English subtitles.
