Bob le Flambeur

Suffused with wry humor, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication, influencing the coming French New Wave. After losing big, an aging and tired gambler eager to leave the game (Roger Duchesne) navigates the treacherous world of pimps, moneymen, and naive associates while plotting one last score—a heist at the Deauville casino. In 1955, when the young and rebellious François Truffaut first saw the film—the first of Melville’s series of film noirs—he exclaimed, “This is the kind of film that we want to make!”