Bob le flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1956) sits where classic French crime cinema meets the New Wave it helped inspire. Shot cheaply on the streets of a nocturnal Montmartre with a roving, improvised freedom, it showed the way to 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, and the planned casino heist is almost an afterthought to the film's affectionate portrait of a milieu. Melville, an avowed lover of American movies, filters Hollywood noir through a Parisian sensibility (the trench coats and fedoras, the dawn light, the fatalistic cool) and arrives at a template he would later perfect in Le Samouraï.

Godard and Truffaut admired it, and its influence runs from the New Wave to Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven. People love it for its texture and tone more than for its plot. Wry, elegant and effortlessly stylish, Bob le flambeur is the urbane grandfather of the modern heist movie, a caper more taken with character and atmosphere than with the loot. That preference for the milieu over the mechanics of the job became a template the caper film has followed ever since. Restored to wide acclaim, it is the most charming of Melville's crime films and a perennial favourite among film-makers.