Jean-Pierre Melville

As one of his films after another is rediscovered, [Jean-Pierre] Melville is moving into the ranks of the greatest directors. He was not much honored in his lifetime...His films, with their precision of image and movement, are startlingly beautiful. -- Roger Ebert

I like the uselessness of effort: the uphill road to failure is a very human thing. -- Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville was mad about America, doting on American films, American music, American fashion (he was known for wearing Ray-Bans). Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew, he took "Melville" as a pseudonym because he adored the very American works of Herman Melville. He was a thrillingly intelligent man who was perhaps the first cineaste to become a major director in his own right, pre-dating Godard, Truffaut, and the rest of the French New Wave. He told an interviewer, "Don't forget that I am still -- above all! -- a spectator, and being a spectator is the greatest profession in the world."

Ebert is right -- it took the world a long time to catch up with Melville, and by the time it did he was long dead. When his persistently unavailable 1969 masterpiece Army of Shadows, about the French Resistance during World War II, was finally restored and released to American theaters and on DVD in 2006-2007, it rightly drew as much unanimous critical praise across the spectrum as I have ever witnessed, garnering citations from the New York, Los Angeles, and National Societies of Film Critics. It was by far the best film I saw in 2007, and one of the best I have seen in my life. I have a hard time imagining a film buff who wouldn't be knocked out by it.

A good portion of Melville's oeuvre is made up of "gangster" films, of which the first was the now legendary 1955 Bob le Flambeur ("Bob the Gambler," or, better, "Bob the High Roller"). It is a terrific film but calling it a "gangster" film or even a "heist" film may mislead potential viewers as to the experience they will have. Melville himself was closer when it called it a "comedy of manners." He indicated that he altered his original conception somewhat so as not to compete with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, which he greatly admired. (I wonder what he thought of Huston's Moby Dick? -- to my mind a highly underrated Herman Melville adaptation.)

The "uselessness of effort" is very much to the point in Bob le Flambeur. Bob is a courtly hood of the old school, who, 50-ish, is trying to lead a pre-war life in a post-war world -- hence the comic aspect. Melville recapitulated the theme in his casting by digging up the pre-war star Roger Duchesne, who had not made a film since 1943 and had "drifted into a life of crime" (Melville's words). He had also been arrested for working with the German Gestapo (interesting in light of Army of Shadows).

Duchesne is perfectly iconic as Bob: he looks just right, which matters. He has a bit of the Archie Goodwin quality I have discussed before, of enjoying exactly where he has situated himself; except that here it is more of a remembered quality. He goes through the motions of what once brought him pleasure in that way -- staying up till dawn every night in Montmartre, which is a wee bit ridiculous for a man his age; he's not the same guy, and it's not the same Montmartre. Perhaps aging doesn't sit well on Archie Goodwins; history seems to leave them behind, too -- they are era-specific. Bob is a deflated Archie.

Melville and his crew, working on a sputtering micro-budget, got out into the streets of Paris and created a visual look for the film that is simultaneously semi-documentary and mythic. Melville has said that the Paris of his boyhood still had a kinship to the Paris of Eugene Sue's mid-19th century novel The Mysteries of Paris, and here he captures the last vestiges of that feeling as it disappears. I'd also swear that an early shot in Bob le Flambeur is an intentional hommage to Gustave Caillebotte's great 1877 painting Paris Street, Rainy Day, one of the most arresting images of Paris ever captured.