Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

Cast: Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, André Garey, Gérard Buhr, Claude Cerval, Colette Fleury, René Havard, Simone Paris, Howard Vernon. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, August Le Breton. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Production design: Claude Bouxin. Film editing: Monique Bonnot. Music: Eddie Barclay, Jo Boyer. 

Sometimes the pleasures you get from a movie are not the intended ones of plot or action or dialogue. For example, I get a great delight from hearing how the French actors in Bob le Flambeur pronounce the title character's name: It's closer to "Bub" than to the American "Bahb." But even that incidental detail is somehow essential to what the film is all about: a reworking of American culture -- the gangster movie -- in the French manner. It would be different somehow if the title character were named Jules or Pierre or Marcel, but calling him Bob, even with a French accent, sets up all sorts of subliminal reverberations. It's intriguing that the foreign filmmakers who most successfully translated the gangster genre to their own cultures were the French and the Japanese. The latter reworked the figure of the samurai into that of the yakuza, while the former turned the existential loner into the outlaw. Jean-Pierre Melville's film is a celebrated precursor of the French New Wave, to which Melville himself became central in 1967 when he gave Alain Delon Bob's fedora and trenchcoat and made Le Samouraï, thereby merging all three cinematic gangster mythologies. For my part, the chief delight of Bob le Flambeur is its essential Frenchness, particularly Henri Decaë's lovingly crafted images of Montmartre, as masterly in their way as those of Lautrec or Utrillo.  

Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949)

Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949)

Cast: Jacques Tati, Guy Decomble, Paul Frankeur, Santa Relli, Maine Vallée, Delcassan, Roger Rafal, Jacques Beauvais, Alexandre Wirtz. Screenplay: Jacques Tati, Henri Marquet, René Wheeler. Cinematography: Jacques Mercanton, Jacques Sauvageot. Film editing: Marcel Morreau. Music: Jean Yatove.

Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

Chekhov's gun plays a major role in Les Cousins, heightening the suspense about who will use it on whom. But the film isn't a suspense thriller, despite Chabrol's admiration for Hitchcock, so much as it is a deliciously perverse adaption of some classic fables: the country mouse and the city mouse, and the ant and the grasshopper. It also resonates ironically with Balzac's Lost Illusions, the novel that a bookseller (Guy Decomble) allows Charles (Gérard Blain) to "steal" from his shop. In the Balzac novel, a young man from the provinces goes to Paris to seek fame, fortune, and love, and his misadventures wreak havoc on himself and the people he loves. In Les Cousins, country mouse/ant Charles goes to Paris to share an apartment with his cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), the city mouse/grasshopper, while both study law. Paul is a somewhat decadent hedonist, who tries to introduce the straiter-laced Charles, who is very much dedicated to his mother back home, to the delights of the city. One of these delights is the promiscuous Florence (Juliette Mayniel), with whom Charles falls in love, only to have things end badly when she chooses to live with Paul instead. Chabrol fills the movie with quirky, somewhat sinister characters, though never turns the film into a clear-cut tale of good vs. evil. Innocence doesn't triumph over cynicism here, though cynicism pays a price, which is what makes Chabrol's film such a grandly satisfying one to watch and to think about afterward. Blain and Brialy (in a suitably Mephistophelean mustache and beard) are brilliant, and the cinematographer, Henri Decaë, gives us a grand evocation of Paris in the 1950s.