Bob le Flambeur (The Criterion Collection)
by Jean-Pierre Melville
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Claude Cerval, Daniel Cauchy, Gerard Buhr, Guy Decomble, Isabelle CoreyDirector: Jean-Pierre Melville
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Henri Decaë
Composer: Jean Boyer
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-04-16
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Bob le Flambeur (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: A love letter for Paris!
Summary: 5 Stars
Since some years ago , Bob , a delinquent in the fifties great amateur to game has been a timeless looser . He meets a teenager just before to fall in prostitution and decides rescue her , he gives some money and receives her in his home . But at once Paulo a orphan and homeless young man will fall in love with her . Very soon he will be inspired for a ambitious plan , and organizes with supreme shyness and coordination every little detail concerned with the master robe but ironically the fate once more makes a raid . the rest runs for your own .
This film constitutes the first policiac title of Jean Pierre Melville and stamps the irruption amazingly mature of a style simply unconfoundable. The firmness of its building and the perfection of its calligraphy are factors which convert it in an self determined entity valuable and bty itself, despite of the relayionship that you can establish with other next work.
Bob le flambeur attends more the instant than the globality , it is much more a cronicle than a spectacularly dramatized account. The movie seems to be made under the fascination of the american cinema . The film gives out a freeing and liberty , such trust in the expressive power of the image , made in equal parts of rules knowing and instint for ignore them . The raccords and the axis are not at all barriers which imprison the narrative freedom .
You will watch a Montmartre flood of heterogeneous night fauna . What Bob experiences in his lucky game was described for Kafka as the most dangerous of the tasks: to remeet and remake oneself in front of a mirror image pierced in a fragment of crystal .
The tragedy is variegated with a comedy patine , which turns in a more real perspective with that life tricks , these unknown crossroads set in the road as an army of naked demons. Undoubtly we are in the presence of a immortal work , timeless and deeply revealer of those times . And notice that Rififi was released the same year too .
The candor of the characters depicted and the soft breeze of a nocturnal Paris with its little madness and and caprices make of this film a supreme jewel and one of the pioneers films of the fifties in all the story of the cinema
Summary of Bob le Flambeur (The Criterion Collection)
Suffused with wry humor, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication to lay the roadmap for the French New Wave. As the neon is extinguished for another dawn, an aging gambler navigates the treacherous world of pimps, moneymen, and naïve associates while plotting one last score-the heist of the Deauville casino. This underworld comedy of manners possesses all the formal beauty, finesse and treacherous allure of green baize.A singular masterpiece that served as a clarion call for the coming French New Wave, this 1955 love letter to the city of Paris and the American urban noir films of the 1930s and 1940s is precisely the sort of cinematic consideration of genre influences that became the soul of early works by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (a filmmaker so enamored of American culture he adopted the name of Moby Dick's author), Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler) concerns a courtly gangster who plans on robbing a casino. But the film is less about the trappings of a conventional heist tale than about Melville's embrace of the form and his wistful weavings within it. The title character (Roger Duchesne) is almost a knight errant, with a visible gallantry and code of loyalty suggesting Melville's own dreams of film tradition, reinvented into something both faithful and new. A terrific experience and an important sliver of film history. --Tom Keogh
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