Cheap Bob le Flambeur - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Isabelle Corey, Roger Duchesne) (Jean-Pierre Melville) Price
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| ACTORS: | Isabelle Corey, Roger Duchesne |
| CATEGORY: | DVD |
| DIRECTOR: | Jean-Pierre Melville |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 01 January, 1955 |
| MANUFACTURER: | Criterion Collection |
| MPAA RATING: | PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) |
| FEATURES: | Black & White |
| TYPE: | Foreign Film - French |
| MEDIA: | DVD |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
| UPC: | 037429165928 |
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Customer Reviews of Bob le Flambeur - Criterion Collection
A great discovery! I first saw this movie at a local film festival a year ago and fell in love with it. The characters are fascinating, ones you want to revisit again and again. And what a terrific caper! Isabelle Corey, one of the great but unrecognized beauties of the '50s, is marvelous.
It's great to now own this film on DVD. Lots of good extra features, including an audio interview with the director (from 1960) and a brand new filmed interview with one of the stars.
If you enjoy film noir and "gangster" films, this French classic is a must.
A staggering, hugely influential, one-off.
If 'Bob le Flambeur' is known at all today it is as inspiration for the New Wave, with its cheap location shooting, its cinephilia (especially american) and its dismantling of genre. In this, it is perhaps even more successful than 'A Bout de Souffle' - despite Godard's best efforts, he is defeated by the charisma of his stars.
Melville called 'Bob' a 'comedy of manners', and it is much lighter in tone than his later, more famous gangster films. As the title suggests, it is Bob's gambling, rather than criminality, that is important - look at how the circle of the roulette wheel and horses shape the film's imagery and structure.
There is a tragic gangster plot, a heist, an Oedipal conflict, but they co-exist with the comedy, a dream modernism and a documentary evocation of 1950s Montmartre (its nightclubs, neon lights and cacophony of sounds (three years before 'Touch of Evil')) and Deauville (its casinos and beaches). This is the sort of movie that will spend ten minutes on a man playing cards, and one on the heist he has spent the whole movie organising.
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This, of course, is a great movie and the DVD also has a really interesting interview with Daniel Clauchy, the actor who plays Paulo, talking about the experience of making this film and working with Melville. Also, an interesting interview with Melville excerpted in the DVD booklet. Not to be a brat, but it's worth nothing that, although one of the other reviewers writes the budget for this film was 10X that of other films of the time, it is actually the opposite--Melville shot this for about 18 million (old) francs, about a tenth of what other feature films cost at that time. He used his own script, unknown actors--famously discovering 15 yr old Isabelle Corey walking down the street--and only a small crew, cutting as many costs as possible. The film, however, looks big budget--gorgeous shots of Montmartre, Pigalle, and Parisian nightlife and a beautifully slick, noir style. Isabelle Corey is wonderful, but also see Guy Decomble from 400 Blows as the police inspector.
It's just a great movie: it's meticulously crafted, there's nothing falsely intellectual about it, and it's interesting to see how much influence this has had on all the heist films that have followed.