Bob le flambeur (1956, Jean-Pierre Melville) | The Good Thief (2002, Neil Jordan) (Patreon)

51/100 | 71/100

Second viewing for Bob (last seen 2001), third viewing for Thief (last seen just prior to its U.S. release, initially seen at TIFF '02). Watched them back-to-back this time, and I can no longer hide/deny my heresy: Jordan improves on Melville in almost every conceivable way, transforming a bland character study and routine crime drama into something playfully elegant—a movie that merits Paulo's magnificent throwaway line "Gel is essential when things get complicated." To be fair (and to his credit), Jordan didn't so much remake Bob le flambeur as re-imagine it; while the basic narrative structure remains the same, and a few scenes lift dialogue from the original, everything else has been either heavily tweaked or freshly invented, almost always in ways that constitute a significant improvement. And I say that as someone who generally reveres Melville, even if I prefer his less celebrated films (Le Doulos, Le silence de la mer; I guess Army of Shadows no longer qualifies, but that's also great) to his pure exercises in le cool (though I do like Le Samouraï a lot more than this one). Let's take it element by element.

THE STYLE

Starting here because it's far and away Bob's strongest case. Melville auditions a less implicitly anguished precursor to the Zen-esque indifference practiced and embodied by Le Samouraï's Jef, while throwing in some offbeat formal flourishes; I noted on Twitter my surprise at seeing a rare vertical wipe, for example. (One friend noted that George Lucas employed multi-directional wipes—horizontal, vertical, diagonal—throughout the prequels; another friend pointed out that this particular wipe also looks striking because the new image shoves the previous one down rather than seeming to overlay it.) Jordan goes for a jittery hip-hop vibe, ending most scenes with a split-second freeze-frame (which I'd forgotten about and briefly misinterpreted as a file issue) and borrowing Wong Kar-wai's step-print technique. One approach feels timeless; the other is very much of its early-aughts moment. I enjoy them both. Slight advantage: Bob le flambeur.

THE TITLE CHARACTER

Roger Duchesne appears to be remembered primarily for this role, through which I submit that he largely sleepwalks. That's not necessarily his fault—Melville clearly preferred that his avatars of cool emote as little as possible, and I likewise find Jef's imperturbability largely uninteresting. But Delon has an innate charisma that Duchesne, in my opinion, simply does not, and this film, by nature of its scenario, gives the latter even less to do apart from barely react. Jordan makes Bob more garrulous, more self-amused, more cod-philosophical (right off the bat, as he shoots up in the john: "Strange thing about primes is, the further you get from ze—hey kid. Hey. Hey. Will you shut that door for me, please?")—a man with an apparent death wish who nonetheless relishes life, and who's genuinely vulnerable enough that he handcuffs himself to his bed for three days when he decides to kick heroin. Nick Nolte is one of our finest actors and this was arguably his final great leading role. Decisive advantage: The Good Thief.

THE INGÉNUE

Isabelle Corey's vivaciousness nicely offsets Duchesne's whatever, and the film has more of a pulse when she's onscreen. Nutsa Kukhianidze has that amazing low nasal voice, making her sound perpetually unimpressed, which nicely offsets a more animated Bob. Both films treat Anne as an appendage, yoked to men, but Jordan at least allows her to be present at the casino during the heist, as a sort of good-luck charm, rather than positioning her as a prize to be claimed afterward. Neither Corey nor Kukhianidze made much of a splash thereafter. I'm gonna call this one a draw. Advantage: Neither.

THE ENSEMBLE

Tcheky Karyo always seems to me as if he's trying too hard, so I prefer Guy Decomble's friendly yet dogged Inspector. (Melville's strongest idea here is the cop seeking to prevent a robbery primarily because he doesn't want to arrest his buddy.) On the other hand, Jordan gives us a motley multicultural gang that includes Emir Kusturica as a security expert who'd clearly rather be orchestrating laser light shows set to his own epic guitar solos (why don't more people cast this guy?!), plus a cameo from Ralph Fiennes in which he slashes a fake Picasso while snarling "So, if I don't get my money back by Monday, what I do to both your faces will definitely be Cubist." Torn on the trans character, who's clearly intended to be a progressive addition (and is played by an actual trans woman—quite rare for 2002) but still winds up as a painful gender stereotype predicated on the cliché that women are terrified of spiders. Still, Jordan's just interested in everyone—even the Inspector's assistant or colleague or whatever he is, who has like four minutes of screen time (if that), is seen practicing sleight-of-hand when bored, at one point plucking a card from behind his boss' ear as the boss leans back in his office chair with his eyes closed, exhausted. Modest advantage: The Good Thief.

THE HEIST

No comparison here. Since Melville knows that the heist won't happen, he doesn't bother to create one, apart from showing the safecracker practice getting his time down. This creates a lot of dead space in the middle of the movie, which he fills with ostensible intrigue about who's revealing vital information to whom. Jordan apparently watched Bob le flambeur and thought, accurately, "This could be fantastic if there were actually a goddamn heist in it," then set about creating not one but two, with a decoy heist meant to obscure the real one. And added a third, Prestige-style option involving the identical-twin Polish brothers for good measure. Consequently, most of the aforementioned intrigue involving folks blabbing the plan has been intentionally engineered by Bob, thereby making it far more meaningful when someone gets wind of his true intentions, since he mistakenly believes that only his fake heist has been exposed. Admittedly, it's not terribly plausible that a casino would purchase a bunch of ultra-valuable paintings and then commission fakes to hang on its walls while storing the originals elsewhere. (Even if you were gonna do this, why bother hanging the originals? Are you conducting tours?) That's the sort of thing I'll happily suspend disbelief about, though, so long as the result entertains. Truly ludicrous advantage: The Good Thief.

THE ENDING

Bob le flambeur mostly kills time waiting to arrive at its clear raison d'être: the climactic irony in which Bob, a perpetual loser of late, gets so distracted by a massive winning streak at the tables that he entirely forgets about the heist (and rakes in so much cash that he's unconcerned about being arrested...though he's also oddly unconcerned about the death of his young protégé). That's a superb idea, but Melville inexplicably whiffs it, setting up a dynamic in which Bob's presence at a specific time and place will warn the other gang members off (so far so good) and then somehow not showing Bob discover that the cops are onto them after the heist is underway. (It's unclear to me if/when he ever learns that, actually, but if it were beforehand there'd be no need for him to be in the casino at all. He could just notify the others wherever they are.) Consequently, the intended amalgam of Bob's exhilaration and the viewer's growing dread never quite coalesces. Rather than correct this error, Jordan simply drafts an entirely new ending, removing the tragic aspect and making Bob's amazing run of luck wholly positive. (The safe even gets robbed as well, hilariously allowing Bob to accuse the casino of having taken the cash itself in order to avoid paying out.) I'd have liked to see a non-bungled version of Melville's original finale, but that really wouldn't fit the film as Jordan has re-imagined it. He's created a flat-out celebration, which imo is preferable to French Bob smirking a few feet away from his friend's corpse. Advantage: The Good Thief.

THE USE OF JOHNNY HALLYDAY'S "NOIR C'EST NOIR"

Only heard in The Good Thief. Winner: The Good Thief.