DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Melville 
PRODUCERS: Jean-Pierre Melville, Serge Silberman, Roger Vidal
SCREENPLAY: Jean-Pierre Melville, Auguste Le Breton 
PHOTOGRAPHY: Henri Decaë
EDITOR: Monique Bonnot
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Claude Bouxin
COSTUME DESIGNER: Ted Lapidus
MUSIC: ​Eddie Barclay, Jo Boyer
WITH: Isabelle Corey (Anne), Daniel Cauchy (Paulo), Roger Duchesne (Robert 'Bob' Montagné), Guy Decomble (Le commissaire Ledru), André Garet (Roger), Gérard Buhr (Marc), Claude Cerval (Jean - le croupier)

REVIEW

Suffused with wry humor, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication to lay the road map for the French New Wave.

“Bob le flambeur is Melville’s love poem to Paris’s Pigalle and its lowlife denizens. It’s a gangster film that is turned by Melville’s taste for the absurd into what he calls “a comedy of manners,” albeit cast in the shades of the pure policier. An aging safecracker and compulsive gambler, Bob (Roger Duchesne) lives by night and sleeps by day, and thrives on his nostalgia for the prewar gangster milieu, before the infiltration of the Gestapo upset the delicate balance between cop and criminal. He cruises Paris streets in a big American car dogged by a daring camera, a swinging jazz track, and a cool obsession. Bob’s going for the big stakes now: the casino vault in Deauville. ‘I like futility of effort,’ Melville said. ‘The uphill road to failure is a very human thing. . . . Even so, Bob is still a light-hearted film, [one that] ends on a pirouette.’”

— Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Nelson     
Tuesday 4 August, 6.00pm

Auckland  
​Level 3 restrictions apply in Auckland from 12 midday, 12 August 2020
Monday 17 August, 6.30pm - suspended

Wellington     
Monday 24 August, 6.15pm

Queenstown     
Tuesday 8 September, 8.15pm

Hamilton     
Monday 28 September, 8.00pm

New Plymouth     
Wednesday 14 October, 6.00pm
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French Cinema presented with the cooperation of the Embassy of France and Institut Français