THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER. Seven Arts, 1961. Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Pierre Mondy, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Allégret (debut), Charles Denner. Based on the novel Compartiment Tueurs (aka The 10:30 From Marseille) by Sébastien Japrisot. Director: Costa-Gravas.

   Before he made his mark as a political director with leftist leanings, Costa-Gravas made his debut with this slick little police thriller about the hunt for a mad killer.

   The police are represented by Inspector Grazziano (Grazzi) played by Yves Montand and his younger partner Grabert played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose involvement begins with the discovery of a body on the Phoce’en, the 10:30 morning train from Marseille, and an attractive young woman who has been murdered.

   We are almost instantly in Maigret country, but to Costa-Gravas’s credit, he establishes his own visual style and technique rather than rely on memories of films of Simenon’s novels. There is nothing leisurely or casual about Montand and Grabert. They are real policemen who chew on antacids, smoke too many cigarettes, and take endless notes, and almost from the top they are up to their necks in it, because before they have finished sorting the first corpse there’s a second waiting for them. The weariness in Montand’s lined doggedly handsome features becomes a character in itself.

   Police and authorities are seldom sympathetic characters in Costra-Gravas’s films, so it comes as a shock how much this film identifies with its put-upon policeman heroes.

   They are decent men with lives outside the office, and would rather do just about anything than have their superiors down their necks as they face an increasing number of corpses and a possibly mad killer.

   Costa-Gravas relies less on flashy camerawork and more on storytelling in this one, with atmosphere to spare, thanks to cinematographer Jean Tournier’s brilliant camera work, the film’s quick pace and the well-done action scenes.

   Signoret and the rest of the cast are fine, as might be expected, and thanks to staying close to Japrisot’s tight cinematic script, the film is both suspenseful and a good mystery well-solved.

   That said, you would do well to find a copy of the film with subtitles and avoid the awful dubbed version I first saw.

   Costa-Gravas became a world wide sensation with his next film, Z, but his increasingly leftist films became more propaganda than entertainment, though his one American film Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, was highly thought of. Since then politics outstripped the film-making in too many of his later works. Montand also appeared in Z, State of Siege, and The Confession all helmed by Costa-Gravas, forming one of the French cinema’s most productive teamings.

   Sébastien Japrisot is one of the more familiar French writers on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to the films of his works, including his original screenplays for Rider on the Rain and Goodbye Friend, and adaptations of many others like Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun and One Deadly Summer. Most recently the 2004 film of his novel A Very Long Engagement was an international hit.

FRANK KANE – Esprit de Corpse. Dell 2409, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1965. Cover by Ron Lesser.

   Yes, there’s nothing new in one individual taking on the crooks and corrupt officials in a city. And it’s been done better and in greater depth — The Fools in Town Are on Our Side and Red Harvest come immediately to mind. Nonetheless, this thriller is quite satisfactory for the second rank.

   When a private eye, out of his depth, gets framed for murder in the sleazy Barbary Coast of Carsonette City in Southern California and is, with the eager assistance of his estranged wife, doomed to spend his life in the loony bin, he asks his partner to call in another private eye, Johnny Liddell.

   His partner — a she, although by no means another V.I. Warshawski — flies to New York to enlist Liddell’s help. Apparently she goes in person since her argument isn’t a strong one and she must compensate by “the hemispherical roundness of her full breasts.” Upon viewing them, even clothed, Liddell’s jaw drops and his good judgment vanishes.

   She knows her man.

   (Has there ever been a female client in private-detective literature who had “empty” breasts? Have no tough PI’s been weaned?)

   Though threatened and attacked by the crooks and threatened and arrested by the corrupt police, Liddell emerges triumphant. He understands, and I’m taking his word for it, why the frame took place and how the bookies and the Mafia were being taken by other crooks.

   As an added attraction, one of the villains ostensibly is a closet Edgar Wallace reader. When Liddell catches this desperado in a felonious act, the man says, “Okay, Mac. It’s a fair cop.”

EDITORIAL COMMENT. Bill Deeck, who died far too young in 2004, was a well-known mystery fan and over the years the author of a tall stack of articles and reviews for The Armchair Detective, Mystery Readers Journal, and a number of other zines, including The MYSTERY FANcier.

   Before posting any of his work here, I consulted with Richard Moore, a close friend of his who lived not very far away, and Bill Pronzini, who helped ensure that Murder on 3 Cents a Day, Bill Deeck’s reference work on hardcover lending library mysteries, finally saw publication.

   For covers of many of these books and more on Bill Deeck and how the book came into being, go here.

   Said Richard, when I asked, “I am positive that Bill would be pleased to have his reviews receive another life. They were done without pay originally and the reprinting does not involve revenue. It is hard to imagine an objection.”

   Bill Pronzini: “I agree with Richard. Bill D. would be delighted to see his reviews reprinted on the M*F blog. By all means go ahead.”

   And so I have. This is the first of many of Bill Deeck’s reviews that I will be posting here. I feel greatly privileged to be able to do so.

JOHN GREENWOOD —
        ● Mosley by Moonlight. Quartet, UK, hardcover, 1984. Walker, US, hc, 1985; Bantam, US, pb, April 1986.
        ● Mists Over Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1986; Walker, US, 1986; Bantam, US, pb, September 1987.

   The best work on mysteries in the British village is the chapter by Mary Jean De Marr in Comic Crime (1987), edited by Earl Bargainnler and published by Bowling Green’s Popular Press.

   Although Ms. De Marr covered some recent examples, I suspect that she hadn’t caught up with John Greenwood’s series of six books about Inspector John Mosley, whose territory covers the small towns on the very flexible border between the counties of York and Lancaster.

   British-village mysteries, contrasted with the generally unsophisticated examples of rural-American detective stories, are told in a sophisticated style and permit the reader to have fun at the expense of the local characters.

   Greenwood, the pseudonym of the late John Buxton Hilton, was excellent on atmosphere, if a bit weak on plotting. Prime examples are the second and fourth books in the series, Mosley by Moonlight, in which a British television crew invades the town of Hadley Dale when extraterrestrial sightings are reported, and Mists over Mosley, about a coven of witches and municipal corruption.

   Mosley is an unusually enigmatic sleuth, one who likes to “keep himself to himself” as the British say. He has a knack of disappearing but then turning up under strange circumstances, properly surprising Greenwood readers.

INSP. JACK MOSLEY.    Series character created by John Greenwood, pseudonym of John Buxton Hilton, 1921-1986.    [Data expanded from that found in Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

       Murder, Mr. Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1983. Walker, US, 1983; Bantam, US, pb, Feb 1986.

       Mosley by Moonlight. Quartet, UK, 1984. Walker, US, 1985; also Bantam, US, pb, April 1986.
       Mosley Went to Mow. Quartet, UK,1985. Walker, US, hc, as The Missing Mr. Mosley, 1985; also Bantam, pb, Dec 1986.

       Mists Over Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1986. Walker, US, 1986; Bantam, US, pb, Sept 1987.
       The Mind of Mr. Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1987. Walker, US, 1987; Bantam, US, pb, July 1988.
       What, Me, Mr. Mosley? Quartet, UK, 1987. Walker, US, 1988; Bantam, US, pb, 1989.

   Judy and I got home yesterday around 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s 550 miles between here and London, and while it was easy enough, taking two days by car each way, we regretting not leaving more time for visiting with my brother and his family.

   We had no problems crossing the border, but my daughter and her husband did. You can read about their adventure here on Mark’s blog.

   The weather on the day of my niece’s wedding was truly beautiful — a bright blue sky with the temperate in the low 70s — and everything went off well. A day to remember. I hope to have some photos to post here soon.

   It will take another day or so for us to recover, but after that I have a backlog of material to post. I’ll get to it as soon as I can!

   Canada, that is. Ontario. I thought I might get some reviews posted today, but it’s taken more time to get ready than I’d planned on.

   Judy and I are leaving tomorrow around noon. It will take us two days to get there by car, but we’ll be in plenty of time for my brother’s daughter Jocelyn’s wedding on Saturday. My sister and her husband from Michigan will be there, and my daughter and her husband from Illinois are driving up also.

   So it’ll be a small family reunion of sorts as well — the most Lewises in one spot in quite a while. Judy and I looking forward to it — not the driving part so much, but we don’t need to push ourselves, so that’ll be OK — but I’m going to leave the computer at home.

   This blog’s going to be idle for a while, in other words, so hang on till about this time next week. I have plenty of reviews and other stuff piled up for posting as soon as I get back — of both books and movies, lots more of what you’ve been seeing here recently — and the way things look now, there’ll be a few more contributors who’ll be appearing soon.

      Take care, and so long for now.

                     — Steve

DELUSION. Cineville, 1991. Jim Metzler, Jennifer Rubin, Kyle Secor, Jerry Orbach. Director & co-screenwriter: Carl Colpaert.

   This is a pretty good example of a category that can’t be called anything but neo-noir. Produced way past the usual late 1950s closing date for the first grouping of noir films, and made especially with the term (and the goal of making a) noir film in mind, movies in this particular genre are also made cheaply and have many of the same themes as the originals …

   … but they’re almost always in color — often brilliant, blinding color — and obviously they include a lot more overt violence and sexuality than the directors in the 1940s could ever have dreamed of.

   Most of them have had very limited theatrical releases. Many of these crime-oriented features were direct-to-video (and now direct-to-DVD) and used to show up on HBO, Showtime and Cinemax after 11 o’clock all the time.

   (For some reason they don’t any more, and I don’t know why. Late night programming seems to consist of regular movies that run all day long, over and over, or really awful softcore pornography.)

   Reviews I’ve seen of Delusion have been mixed. The New York Times hated it, but two reviewers for the Washington Post were of totally opposite opinions. I thought the first half was also first-rate; the second half, well, second-rate.

   Here’s a question for you. Suppose you’re a guy into computers, and you’re on the run from your former employer with nearly a half million dollars in cash stashed in the trunk of your car. You’re on the road somewhere in the desert (Nevada, let’s say) and you see the car that just careened past you moments before spin off the highway and land upside down in the sand. Two people, a man and a woman, are struggling to get out.

   Would you stop? Would you offer them a lift?

   Generally speaking I guess most people would, and like George O’Brien (Jim Metzler), I guess a lot of people would be ruing their decision within minutes, kicking themselves no end for being so kind-hearted.

   Two more flaky people — seriously flaky, let’s be emphatic here — than Patti (Jennifer Rubin) and Chevy (Kyle Secor), could scarcely be imagined. How soon can he possibly get them out of his car, George is thinking, and you can just see it in his face and tortured body language as the predicament he’s in starts to sink in.

   Do they have guns? Yes. Do they have other plans in mind? Yes. Or at least Chevy does, on both counts. Patti’s involvement is not so clear. There are a couple of really good twists coming, one of them (or maybe both) involving Chevy’s friend Larry (Jerry Ohrbach) who is living alone in a trailer beside a small lake in the middle of the desert.

   The couple of good twists come a little bit too early, though. I was set up to expect one or two more, and I was disappointed when I didn’t get them – or in other words, as I previously implied, the second half doesn’t begin to match up in a direct comparison with the first.

   It’s still a noir film all the way, however, allowing some forgiveness for a couple of allegedly comic touches, also in the second half.

   As George finds himself sinking more and more quickly into the quicksandish trap he’s let himself in for, the question he finds that he must keep asking himself is, how important is the stolen money to him?

   Jennifer Rubin, by the way, was the original model in Calvin Klein Obsession ads, and this movie was relatively early in her career. She’s quite beautiful, obviously, and in the first half (I keep getting back to this, don’t I?) she’s plays enigmatic very well. Make that extremely well. Once she’s given some dialogue, you know that an actress she wasn’t yet.

   Not that her career went uphill from here. Other than the lead role in the remake of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman, which came along later, I don’t see anything but mediocre parts in even more mediocre movies on her resume.

   Uploaded this morning was Part 32 of the ongoing online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. New and corrected information continues to stream in. Part 31, for example, was uploaded only two months ago.

   The data consists of a few new authors and titles, as always, but again as usual the large portion of it consists of additional facts about books and authors previously included, such as settings, series characters (both added and deleted), and films based on titles in CFIV but not previously noted.

   Tise Vahimagi’s recent article on Eric Ambler’s TV credits revealed four made-for-TV movies or mini-series not previously noted, for example, and new films such as Killshot (Elmore Leonard) and In the Electric Mist (James Lee Burke) have recently appeared as direct-to-DVD released. Both have been included, as well as a French film based on Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street (2007), not known about until a serendipitous discovery on IMDB only two days ago.

   Data at least through Part 32 will be included in the 2009 CD-ROM edition of Crime Fiction IV, which should be available at the time of this year’s Bouchercon. Data accumulated through the rest of the summer will be posted online in Part 33, but (as I understand it) there might not be time for it to be included on the upcoming CD.

   So follow the link above and feel free to browse around. If you spot any errors and would like to make corrections, or if at any time you have additional information to supply, then of course, please do!

   Edward Candy (Barbara Alison Boodson Neville, 1925-1993) spaced her mysteries widely: two in the first part of the 1950s were followed by two more in the 1970s. Her Words for Murder, Perhaps (Gollancz, 1971; Hogarth Press, 1985) is subtitled “A Detective Story,” but as the most recently published book among those being now reviewed, it is not one in the Golden Age sense: it would appear not to be the author’s objective to fairly challenge the reader.

   But the tale is quite a pleasant one, a neat puzzle in an academic setting. Gregory Roberts (misidentified on the dust jacket as Robert Gregory) lectures at Bantwich University, and teaches also in the “Extra-Mural” (adult education) department.

   He’s about 40, living with his mother after barely surviving a disastrous marriage and ensuing cuckolding, attempted suicide, psychiatric treatment, and divorce. Now his cuckolder and ex-wife’s present husband disappears, and the ex-wife receives a typewritten excerpt from an elegy in the mail.

   Signs seem to point to Roberts, who’s presenting Detective Fiction to a class of adults, including Nan Jones, a widow who seems to be reviving the youth of his soul. Then a fellow extramural lecturer dies of cyanide, amidst evidences of another elegy. Police continue to sniff about, Roberts fears his life is coming unglued, and death marches on…

   Death on the Cliff (Benn, 1932) is my first exposure to Thomas Cobb, who produced a number of works in our field during the Golden Age. Cliff is not a brilliant representative of its hallowed era: the puzzle is neither baffling nor compelling, the detection is slight, the people are not fascinating, and the rural English setting is ordinary.

   Lady Roperson, whose 50ish husband is straying regularly from the connubial fold, is found dead on the rocks at the bottom of a cliff near their home. “Misadventure,” says the coroner’s jury – but Margaret Fairbrook, the dead woman’s daughter, immediately turns on her step-father, and Susannah Roperson (his daughter) develops an awful sense that murder has been done. Especially after a second death at almost the same spot as the first.

   A private detective (once of the Yard) comes into the picture but plays a minor role. The truth emerges as Susannah comes to ask the right questions of the right people.

   It’s been established that Sefton Kyle was an alter ego for Roy Vickers, who achieved a certain currency in this country when discovered by Ellery Queen. So I was interested to try one of the Kyle novels (none of which was ever published in this country): Red Hair (Jenkins, 1933).

   Although from the publisher’s plot summary this appeared to be wholly non-criminous, a perusal proved this not to be the case. A murder occurs early and is pivotal to resulting events (though the reader knows at once who did it), and Kyle/Vickers/David Durham’s series Insp. Rason is our contact with Scotland Yard. (Rason’s adventures were chronicled under all three bylines, although the good inspector’s first initial seems to vary from book to book.)

   The book is basically a gothic, and provides all the frustrations of the species. Secretary Patricia Ridge marries her politically rising boss, Sir Brennan Grantley, then discovers his first wife – long thought dead – has resurfaced.

   Instead of confiding in Grantley, she tries to save his career, embarking on a course dotted with deception, theft and murder – a quagmire in which her every effort at extrication results in increased danger. Of course, all ends well as expected. Not recommended.

   Charles Ashton was another Golden Age practitioner not known in this country. My first sampling was Death Greets a Guest (Nicholson & Watson, 1936).

   Here a regular meeting of a rural archeological society at Squire Eastwood’s Heatherling Hall is interrupted by a sudden downpour. And by murder: a guest, an artist who accompanied a regular member, is found shot in Eastwood’s summerhouse.

   It seems that no member can be guilty, that no motive exists, and that premeditation could not have been possible. Colonel Bretherton, Chief Constable, and Inspector Williams are baffled, but Major Jack Atherley, champion cricketeer and amateur sleuth, is on hand to sort matters out.

   Competent, readable, pleasant, and quite forgettable.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column. Unfortunately this marks the end of this particular grouping of reviews, which were first published on the main Mystery*File website some four years ago. It was my thought that reprinting them here on the blog would bring fresh attention to them. By all accounts, it has. Thanks to everyone for their comments over the entire eight installments!

   A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

BOB LE FLAMBEUR. Mondial, France, 1956; William Mishkin, US, 1959, as Bob the Gambler. Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, André Garet, Gérard Buhr, Guy Decomble. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville.

   One of the advantages of being something of a round peg in a department of square holes is that I am occasionally allowed to teach something that “nobody else” has any interest in doing, like the course on French Film that I have just finished teaching.

   Most of the films are by directors like Renoir, Clair, Virgo, Carne, and Ophuls, but I always manage to slip in a genre film by a director not many people would consider essential. In past years this meant films by Clouzot (Le Cor beau and Jenny Lamour).

   This year it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 thriller, Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler), a film that Melville had repudiated before his death in 1972 (“I will not allow this film ever to be screened again”) but that many critics now consider to be his finest achievement in a series of studies of criminals and the criminal milieu.

   Ostensibly, Bob the Gambler is an extended character study leading to a climactic caper, the robbery, by a team of well trained specialists, of the casino at Deauville.

   But Melville manages to undermine almost every cliche of the caper film with a rigorously analytic style that manages to distance the spectator from the characters and cut away from the caper at the climactic moment, only returning to it in the final moments to dispense almost briskly with the basic plot elements and provide a final, comically ironic look at the protagonist, Bob the gambler.

   Melville, in an interview, related how, after seeing Huston’s film The Asphalt Jungle, he realized that he no longer wanted to — or could not — make a classic caper film. He decided instead to make what he called a “comedy of manners” (“comedie de moeurs”), but most American viewers will probably, like the students in my class, find this an odd film indeed.

   Melville’s film preceded New Wave films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by about four years, but the look of the film (shot on location in the streets and buildings of Montmartre) and the use of a jazz sound track seem to look forward to the innovative filmmaking of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The credits are presented over shots of Montmartre from the “heights” of Sacre-Coeur (the church) to the “depths” of Place Pigalle, a moral distance underlined by the matter-of-fact narration of Melville.

   But the spectator who expects an explicit moralistic study of the contrasts between the sacred and the profane will be disconcerted as the camera prowls restlessly along the streets, into the back rooms of cafes and restaurants, with Sacre-Coeur only present as a shape dimly glimpsed through the closed curtains of Bob’s elegant apartment.

   The affection the camera shows for the landscape may be disconcerting to the viewer who is looking for a narrative thread that will engage him, but location filming is a prominent feature of New Wave films, as in The 400 Blows, whose “travelogue” beginning is reminiscent of the beginning of Bob, all the more so in that both films benefited from the same superb photographer, Henri Decae.

   The final shot in Bob is of an empty car parked on a lonely stretch of beach and completes a circle initiated by the documentary shots of buildings at the beginning of the film.

   The inner life of the characters is never explored in a way that is satisfying to the viewer, and it is perhaps appropriate that the frame is emptied of people at the beginning and the end.

   The viewer expecting the tight plotting of Hitchcock or the claustrophobic, fatalistic character study of Huston, will be disappointed. In Melville’s work, fate is chance, but the camera lingers on geometric patterns (wall-paper, windows, a floor covering) that suggest an intercrossing of plot lines that will only be evident on repeated viewings.

   The characters are elusive and the “content” of their relationships is like a crossword puzzle that may or may not be correctly filled in by the spectator.

   Melville’s expressed wish that the film not be re-released has been ignored. The formal, discreet patterns of this apparently open but controlled narrative with something of the look of a photograph by Walker Evans have lost none of their capacity for frustrating the viewer accustomed to the heightened, mounting suspense of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

   All three of these films are about defeat and loss, but Bob manages to retrieve an ironic victory from a failure, and the sardonic humor of this victory appears to clash with the conventions it has intermittently adhered to.

   In Breathless, Goddard paid tribute to Melville by including, a reference to the character, Bob (Roger Duchesne), and by using Melville to play the role of a novelist interviewed by Patricia, the young American with whom the small-time Parisian hoodlum, Michel, has fallen in love.

   She betrays Michel, echoing the thematics of betrayal in Bob, where Anne (Isabelle Corey) betrays Paulo and Bob’s careful planning, but the final irony is perhaps Melville’s attempted betrayal of his beautiful and still fascinating portrait of Bob the gambler and his Parisian milieu.

   And one can only wonder to what extent Godard was again tipping his hat to Melville when one of his characters comments that he and his friends avoid Montmartre, which is dangerous for them and their “kind.”

   But Godard met successfully the cinematic challenge of his gifted predecessor and his tribute is, finally, the best witness to Melville’s achievement.