The Good Thief

Synopsis: Bob Montagnet (Nick Nolte) is an ex-con with a heroin addiction,down on his luck and living in Nice. When he is approached to rob a casino what has he got to lose? The only problem is that the cops are onto him.

The Good Thief is somewhat of an oddity, slickly insubstantial yet no mere by-numbers outing, born in France, schooled in America, annoying for a large part, yet in the final outcome, entertaining. Writer/director Jordan may take his share of both blame and credit for the equivocal outcome but Nick Nolte is undoubtedly its salvation.

"Salvation" is an apt term because this remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (1955) is more akin to Hollywood super-hero fol-de-rol than the French director’s original film, set as it was in the grey, rain-swept streets of the Paris of Sartre, Camus and Cartier-Bresson. Melville’s Bob was a model crook, a man who respected the thief’s code of honour, and, in turn, respected by his peers for that, but he was also an unromantic figure – sexless, unemotional and a bit grubby. If Melville did finish his film with a triumph for Bob it was a thoroughly ironic one and did not portend any great future beyond the frame. Jordan’s Bob is now an American living amongst the bars and pimps of Nice’s Arab quarter. He’s got a heroin habit and no money. Yet he’s unimpeachably charming, gracefully wise, and by the end of the film, well, I cannot tell you about that, but believe me, there’s no irony in this zero-to-hero transformation. In addition to complexifying the original plot with the development of a "double" heist, Jordan also invests Bob's character with an art connoisseur's sensibility and an aesthetic motivation for his intended crime, qualities far removed from Melville's original.

Purists may shudder at the transformation in style from existentialist fatalism to dirty-rotten-scoundrels hi-jinx but anyone not familiar with the original are more likely to be irritated by the try-hard busy-ness, particularly initially, with the camera ceaselessly moving and everything within frame moving as well, and the credulity-stretching plot that at one point (involving Anne and her "confiding" in Bob) just seems to have a huge air-gap. For a heist movie there’s surprisingly scant regard to the mechanics of the heist and the actual job itself is peripheral.

The heart of Jordan's film, however, is Nolte’s Bob, a classic romantic anti-hero, one of the best I can recall since Bogey’s Marlowe – cynically bemused, self-deprecating, tough and sexy. Of course, he gets the girl. Nolte makes being a junkie look like a walk in the park and as for cleaning out a casino – well, it’s not just easy but damn plausible. There are other characters in the film, notably Bob’s complement on the other side of the law, played by Tcheky Karyo, a French actor who’s been in plenty of American movies. Unlike the De Niro-Pacino tussle in Michael Mann’s Heat, however, this is a very unequal contest. Then there’s a young Russian girl who plays errant daughter to Nolte’s old-enough-to-know-better Dad. But Nolte is the whole game. Some might say the whole film.

 

 

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