Bob le Flambeur (1956) - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Bob Le Flambeur (translated into English as Bob the Gambler) is a groundbreaking film whose impact on cinema has everlasting reverberations in the works that it’s influenced. Everyone from Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight), Michael Mann (Heat) and the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems) owes Jean-Pierre Melville a debt of gratitude for the groundwork laid in Bob Le Flambeur.

Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a gambler on a losing streak. He has the reverse Midas touch. Instead of everything he touches turning into gold, everything he touches turns into a disaster. And in the off chance he wins, he pushes his luck straight into a loss. He’s been “legit” for over twenty years now, sticking to gambling. Staying in his lane. His criminal enterprise pre-dates WWII and he’s kept his nose clean ever since. He’s even friends with a cop named Ledru (Guy Decomble), who keeps tabs on him, just to make sure his nose really is as clean as he says.

Word of a job too good to pass up comes Bob’s way—cracking into the safe of a casino. It’s no easy task, but one he knows he can take on if he has the right crew. What is a heist other than a kind of gamble? You play the odds. You stack them in your favor with a talented crew, but you’re still betting yourself against everything else. Bob will need to play himself against Ledru and the casino’s own security team.

The scenes in which Bob meets Ledru help form the soul of the movie. Ledru wants Bob to know he knows everything, but Bob, the gambler that he is, thinks he can still pull a fast one, by feigning ignorance. They reminded me very much of that scene in Heat with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino getting dinner together and talking about the dedication they have to their respective careers.

Leading up to the heist, the scenes of the rehearsal are just as thrilling as the real thing, giving us an inside look at Bob’s plans. He meticulously recreates the floor room to scale in an open field, using chalk on the ground to mark walls, rooms, staircases, etc. so his crew can get the timing of the robbery down as quickly as they can. They even have a replica of the kind of safe that will be used, with an expert utilizing a stethoscope on four different knobs that need to be tuned in just right for it to open. The safecracker is good, but he’s going to have to have superhuman speed and precision on the night if they’re going to pull this off.

Bob Le Flambeur was made prior to the French New Wave cinema movement but is often considered a precursor to it. As a tweener, in between cinematic languages, it embraces both the noirish exaggeration of shadows, like a piece of German Expressionism, but also the handheld cinéma verité style cinematography to ground the viewer in this hyper-realism. The results are remarkable. There’s something thrilling about seeing a great movie. The way every piece of the plot comes into play, with some rewarding payoff, and you’re comfortable in the hands of a master. Just when you begin to wonder the significance of an earlier conversation, it comes to fruition. Movies like Bob Le Flambeur remind us why we fell in love with film to begin with.

Vital Disc Stats: The Ultra HD Blu-ray
Kino Lorber’s release of Bob Le Flambeur contains two discs, both a 4K UHD Blu-ray and an HD 1080p Blu-ray, housed in a standard case with a removable slipcover. The case and the slip feature identical artwork. All special features are found on the Blu-ray disc.

While there is no HDR grading for the video presentation of Bob Le Flambeur, it has an ace up its sleeve. It looks fabulous, nonetheless, working with a brand-new 4K transfer from StudioCanal of the film’s original 35mm camera negative. Details are razor sharp and natural film grain is noticeable throughout, particularly in shots with lots of white space. Being a classical noir tale, there is a lot of heavy contrast between light and dark, this world of shadows. Blacks are inky black, and with only one shot I noticed some pulsating noise in the shadows. Even with its SDR format, these shots are infrequent and rare, eschewing most technical issues like aliasing. Bob Le Flambeur was shot by Henri Decae, one of the best and most pioneering cinematographers of his era and the results are incredible at every turn. This is probably the most gorgeous this film has ever looked on home video.

Bob Le Flambeur arrives on 4K UHD and Blu-ray with a great-sounding 2.0 mono mix, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. This is going to be a front-only presentation on the soundstage, but it’s a great mix, frequently punctuated with a noirish jazz score, and a thumping bass pumping like a heart during the film’s more tense moments. The sound mix is in French, with English subtitles, and dialogue is always easy to hear, clearly mixed above the action.

Bob Le Flambeur sadly deals its one bad hand in the special features department.  There is only an audio commentary track and a documentary. Both features, however, are very informative and entertaining.

• Audio Commentary – Film critic Nick Pinkerton
• Diary of a Villain (HD 25:45) – Documentary by Dominique Maillet about Bob Le Flambeur
• Theatrical Trailer

Kino Lorber Studio Classics takes all the chips with their release of Bob Le Flambeur, one of the most influential crime films ever made. The video presentation is stellar, damn near flawless, and the audio mix encoded in DTS-HD MA is clear and powerful in equal measure. While the supplements themselves are small in number, the audio commentary track and documentary are great additions for this release. Bob Le Flambeur from KLSC is Highly Recommended.