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From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.

Tuesday 07/14/09

11:00 AM Sundance
Bob le Flambeur (1955 FRA) A day of Jean-Pierre Melville classics kicks off with this terrific crime drama. Roger Duchesne (whose acting career was basically over by the mid ‘50s thanks to accusations of wartime collaboration with the Germans and a predilection for the bottle) stars as the title character, a gone to seed con desperate for One Last Big Job that will leave him fat and happy in his golden years. He plots a casino heist that he hopes will net him and his friends a cool 800 million francs, but as it oft the case, things go awry when Bob's plan is discovered - and he finds himself sucked into the maw of the gambling tables. Filmed beautifully by the great cinematographer Henri Decae, Bob le Flambeur is generally considered to be the film that kicked off what became known as the French "New Wave", but it's also a great caper flick with tremendous appeal for anyone willing to read subtitles. It's followed at 12:45 PM by Melville's Le Doulos (1962), a less well known but equally brilliant dissection of the rise and fall of a petty crook (Serge Reggiani). Bob le Flambeur airs again at 9:30 PM, whilst Le Doulos reappears 7/15 at 10:00 AM.

2:45 PM Sundance
Army of Shadows (1969 FRA): Here's another Melville movie, this one deserving more than a piggy-back mention with Bob le Flambeur. One of the finest films of the late 1960s, Army of Shadows didn't get an American theatrical release until 2006, and had never had a home video release in the United States until May 2007. In fact, until distributor Rialto Pictures dusted it off, the film had been nearly impossible to see anywhere since 1969, when it crashed and burned at the French box office and was summarily consigned to the vaults for the better part of four decades. Based on a wartime novel by Joseph Kessel - translated into English in 1944 for a long since out-of-print Cresset Press edition - the film details the activities of a resistance cell operating in Vichy France. Lino Ventura stars as Philippe Gerbier, an urbane maquis leader plotting against both the German occupiers and their collaborators in the Petain government. His co-conspirators include fast-thinking Mathilde (Simone Signoret), a callow youth known as "le Masque" (Claude Mann), bulky hard man "le Bison" (Christian Barbier), and handsome rake Felix (Jean-Pierre Cassel). When Felix is captured and tortured by the Germans, the cell's safety is compromised, and Mathilde masterminds an effort to rescue their comrade. The rescue mission fails, and the net begins to tighten around the remaining members, setting up a tragic finale that would still be considered anathema in most Hollywood features, and probably didn't help the film's box office performance in France either. It's brilliant if mordant stuff, and airs again 7/15 at 1:15 AM.

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