There are undeniable parallels between his life and the one Melville gives Bob, middle-aged former gangster and gambler on the skids drawn to one last heist, parallels which are lent weight by the artifice with which the figure of Bob is constructed. The impression is less of a correspondence between life and art, and more of a ghostly dialogue between fiction and fiction. Melville\u2019s creation of a world that never existed provides the unreal backdrop: his streets of Montmartre and Pigalle are a secluded underworld of gangsters and cops, conjured from an audacious mix of night time location shooting and highly personal, stylised borrowings from a Franco-American blend of cultural sources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The only depth to Duchesne comes from what we now choose to accord him. A wealth of conflicting stories abounds, with multiple narratives existing for his activities during the war, the reason for his first arrest, and where exactly he was when cast as Bob. However, Duchesne continues to be best known, on a par with Melville\u2019s film, for the rumours of his collaboration with the French Gestapo during the Occupation, his substantial gambling debts to Henri Lafont and other members of SS gangs widely thought to be the catalyst for his involvement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In retrospect he seems to me, above all else, a man of costume, an impression doubtlessly heightened by watching Bob<\/em> in which his character is all exteriors, moulded from a collection of cinematic signs. At one moment he enters a bar at dawn to a particularly dramatic musical cue, the Bogartian ensemble of hat, trench, stubble, cigarette and noirish glower all in place. At another, Melville has him in American-inspired tailoring, driving down the autoroute with panache (and no rear projection) in a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere while talking and laughing with a friend, a collagic but coherent ideal of a performance of masculinity achieved through dress and stance \u2013 and framed by Melville\u2019s controlled movement between overt stylisation and naturalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Duchesne is similarly upholstered. He is not complicated by a star persona forged from his many previous films but always seems disguised, perhaps valuing how clothes make you appropriate to a context and therefore unknowable. As Nick Pinkerton notes in his audio commentary for the film\u2019s 2019 Blu-ray release , it was rumoured Duchesne had attempted to avoid capture during the war by fleeing Paris disguised as a Resistance officer in a suspiciously spotless, home-tailored uniform; and, as per a 1951 article in Le Monde<\/em><\/a> <\/em>covering his trial for the holdup of a tie merchants\u2019, he spent his share of the robbery on new suits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also a rather startling photograph<\/a> taken at one of Duchesne\u2019s many arrests: his exit from the hotel where he had been holed up, wearing a vast, turned-up trench coat under the flare of photographers\u2019 cameras. All that\u2019s visible are the waves of his carefully crenelated hair, the bounds between man and coat appearing to bleed as Duchesne is reduced, or perhaps elevated, to the status of performer in another role. When he was discovered by police, he reportedly told them<\/a>: \u201cje n\u2019ai pas de chance.\u201d Was Duchesne living in a trashy noir of his own devise, like the ones he spent the forties writing<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the war, when rumours of his collaborationist sympathies left him a once-popular actor unable to work he became, according to critic Thierry Crifo in the Blu-ray featurette \u201cDiary of a Villain,\u201d the publicist for then-collabo haunt, Pigalle cabaret L\u2019heure bleue; Duchesne led a life that was, as Crifo succinctly puts it, \u201cnocturne et festive.\u201d Fag in hand in almost every shot, heavy-lidded and fat round the middle like the cabbie who makes his living on the night shift, Duchesne wears the cost of an infinite number of evenings we can only imagine. He plays the tired old crook as if he has lived a hard life, full of intensity and fire, at some point in a vanished past that will never be fully visible or accessible to us. It only appears to remain in the marks it has left on the body, that which belongs to actor and role \u2013 effecting a symbiosis between the two and grounding Duchesne\u2019s performance, giving it a palpable physicality despite the mythical flavor of the part and the film itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Duchesne conveys an intimate pull towards life conjured from artifice, generated by what we can see: a gesture, a way of moving just for a second, drawn from living itself \u2013 from the facts of that life and what it required of him, a stance that Imogen Sara Smith describes in an essay<\/a> on the men of film noir as \u201cminimalist body language speak[ing] of ease painstakingly achieved and sustained.\u201d It is fair to surmise that Duchesne was highly aware of performance as a way of passing muster in the Paris milieu<\/em>, and this gives his depiction of Bob an odd purity as its crux lies in the image itself, in Melville and Duchesne\u2019s stylised and sometimes faltering construction of it, rather than in set-in-stone biographical correspondence or even cut and dry talent. There remains a creaky, old-fashioned, and awkward aspect to his acting here, but whether he can actually act or not is a question that becomes irrelevant, lost in Melville\u2019s embrace of artifice in every element of Bob<\/em> and the demands of his scene-making; Duchesne\u2019s \u2018self-consciousness\u2019 is put to good use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His \u201cpainstaking\u201d appearance of ease with a certain kind of life can be located in Bob\u2019s performances within the film: the glance given to his hand at the tables, the way he drives his car, dances with young drifter Anne (Isabelle Corey); as well as the rasp to his voice, and the eternal presence of a smoked-down cigarette and how it\u2019s held. And there are those moments which always seem to transpire when an actor (or non-actor, or someone somewhere in between) enacts a role which mirrors their own experiences. Throughout the film, gestures seem to slither tellingly through the cracks: the twitch of his mouth as he consults his deck, the slight shaking of his hand as he rests it above, but not on, Anne\u2019s arm. This was undoubtedly the most accomplished performance of Duchesne\u2019s career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Duchesne arrives in Bob<\/em> as if out of a cloud of smoke; his role is an arrival in cinema history, only to be followed by a swift and almost totally consuming departure. He acted in one more film shortly after Bob<\/em>, with Melville\u2019s appendix, when interviewed by Rui Nogueira in 1971, that \u201cI believe he now sells cars near the Porte de Champerret\u201d; Duchesne\u2019s later years reframed as hearsay, myth. Otherwise, how he lived between 1957 and his death on Christmas Day almost forty years later is still unknown; there\u2019s simply nothing to tell, perhaps. “Bob le flambeur” is now streaming<\/a><\/em> as part of the “Gamblers” series<\/a> on the Criterion Channel. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The actor at the center of Melville\u2019s classic \u2013 now streaming on the Criterion Channel \u2013 wasn\u2019t really an actor at all. Or was he? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":629,"featured_media":16529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-16525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/629"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22293,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16525\/revisions\/22293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/bob2-1024x768.jpeg\")
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