Bob le flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1956) stands at the crossroads between classic French crime cinema and the New Wave it helped inspire. Shot cheaply on the streets of a nocturnal Montmartre with a roving, improvisational freedom, it pointed the way for the young critics at Cahiers du cinéma who would soon pick up cameras themselves.

Roger Duchesne plays Bob, the silver-haired gambler whose code of honour matters more to him than any score, in a film that treats its planned casino heist almost as an afterthought to its affectionate portrait of a milieu. Melville, an avowed lover of American movies, filters Hollywood noir through a distinctly Parisian sensibility — the trench coats and fedoras, the dawn light, the fatalistic cool — creating a template he would later perfect in Le Samouraï.

Admired by Godard and Truffaut and a clear influence on everything from the New Wave to Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, the film is beloved as much for its texture and tone as for its plot. Wry, elegant and effortlessly stylish, Bob le flambeur is the urbane grandfather of the modern heist movie — a caper more interested in character and atmosphere than in the loot itself. Restored to wide acclaim, it remains the most charming entry in Melville's crime cinema and a perennial favourite among film-makers. Its affection for the milieu over the mechanics of the heist set a template that the modern caper film has followed ever since.