Author: andyhorbal

From where I’m standing the net impact of expanded legalized sports betting has clearly been negative. Research shows that it results in increased levels of debt for individual consumers, athletes are subject to unconscionable levels of abuse because of it, and the constant barrage of ads and ridiculous celebrity parlays makes the experience of watching sports on TV less fun. For all of these reasons I’d probably support more regulation at this point despite my libertarian inclinations, but as long as it remains so easy to place a bet, I will selfishly continue to enjoy doing so during certain times of year. March is one of them because of the NCAA Tournament, so lately I’ve been thinking about my favorite titular (which disqualifies Howard Ratner) movie gambler, Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne). Here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber DVD copy of the film he lent his name to, Bob le Flambeur:

It is also available for rental from a variety of other platforms, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

The drink I’m pairing it with was created by Natasha David as boozy version of her favorite thing to eat, “dark, bitter chocolate.” Here, per Imbibe, is how you make her All In (which for the uninitiated is a poker term which refers to the act of pushing all of one’s chips into the middle of the table) cocktail:

1 1/2 ozs. Rye (Pikesville)
3/4 oz. Campari
3/4 oz. Dry vermouth (Dolin)
1/4 oz. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Express a lemon twist over the top and discard.

This concoction’s nose is dominated by lemon from the twist, and my brain therefore immediately latched on to the citrus notes in the Campari and Dolin on the sip. There’s also a lot of burn from the rye, though, which combines to create an initial impression not unlike drinking grappa. The swallow and finish are all very dark (think 85+% cacao) chocolate. David specifies rye that is 100-proof or higher, making this a perfect place to showcase Pikesville, which clocks in at 110 and is totally my jam these days. She also described her goal being “to create a dry chocolate cocktail that wasn’t limited to a dessert drink—a cocktail that could be enjoyed any time of the day,” and in that regard the All In is a resounding success.

Bob would appreciate this beverage, as he is no stranger to imbibing during the daylight hours. Here, for instance, we see his best laid plans for breakfast being waylaid by a tempting bottle of wine:

His luxurious apartment, which has one of the best views in the history of cinema and a slot machine in the closet:

“Absolutely massive American car,” as Nick Pinkerton says in his DVD commentary track (where he also identifies it as a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere):

And the fact that he appears to have a standing invitation to join any high-stakes game in Paris all suggest that he must have been more disciplined in his youth, but he is become, in the words of his best friend Roger (André Garet), a “pitiful” compulsive gambler who squanders every big win by taking his profits elsewhere and promptly losing them.

Because he does so in style, though, and according to a moral code that includes generosity to those even less fortunate as one of its primary tenets, he nonetheless remains an idol to the young men in his circle like Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), whose late father knew Bob back in his gangster days:

A hero to young women like Isabelle Corey’s Anne, to whom he provides pocket money and a place to sleep with no expectation of repayment in any form:

And the object of fraternal or maternal affection from compatriots like Roger and Simone Paris’s Yvonne, who purchased her café with a loan from him:

As well as the recipient of professional courtesy from René Havard’s Inspector Morin of the police, whose life he once saved:

If you didn’t know this was a caper movie, you’d never guess it from the first 37 minutes, which function more as a sort of nature documentary showing Bob in his natural environment. As Glenn Erickson observes in his review of Kino Lorber’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray copy of the film which came out last year, the location shooting makes it “a literal time capsule of a long-gone Montmartre, a collection of nightclubs and bars where colorful, unsavory night crawlers plot their next moves.” It begins with a monologue that characterizes the Parisian neighborhood as “both heaven and . . . hell” with the image of a descending funicular and accompanying musical cue during the ellipse.

Anne is introduced as an illustration of how “people of different destinies” cross paths in the pre-dawn hours not by name, but as a girl “with nothing to do” who is “up very early . . . and far too young” who passes a cleaning lady hurrying to work on the street:

Finally, we meet Bob playing craps in an establishment featuring the first example of what J. Hoberman calls “the insistent checkerboard patterns that make the movie so emphatically black-and-white”:

They appear again on the walls of Roger’s office, where author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema Richard Neupert argues they function “to remind the viewer that Bob, with his flowing white hair, sees the world as one big board game”:

Per Neupert, Bob le Flambeur inspired the French New Wave with its “raw, low-budget style that mixes documentary style with almost parodic artifice.” My favorite examples of both tendencies can be found in the rehearsals which lead up to the attempted robbery that Bob begins to plan after he learns that the safe in the Deauville casino will have 800 million francs (which as near as I can work out is about $20 million USD today) at 5am the morning of the upcoming Grand Prix race. After he and Roger find someone (Howard Vernon as McKimmie, who insists on a 50% cut of the take) to finance their operation in the first of many scenes that the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven directed by Steven Soderbergh pays homage to, the “recruitment waltz” begins:

With their team assembled, they set about casing the joint by circling it repeatedly in a car and sketching an outline in a minute-long scene that embodies the “documentary style” Neupert describes:

They also obtain blueprints and specs which they use to obtain a safe so that Roger can practice opening it:

And best of all draw chalk outlines of the casino on a grass field so that they get an accurate sense of the space:

We also see Bob’s vision of how the operation is supposed to in a casino of empty of anyone except him and his crew, a technique borrowed by my July, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection Inside Man among scores of other films:

We never see the actual heist, though, because although Bob arrives at the casino to scope things out at 1:30am as planned in a stylish low-light sequence:

Instead of making contact with Claude Cerval’s Jean, their guy on the inside, like he’s supposed to, he forgets his promise to himself and Roger not to gamble until it is over and places a bet:

He wins, so he places another, this time at odds of 38 to 1:

That hits, too:

And suddenly Bob is off on the heater of his life. The voiceover informs us although the roulette is over by 2:01, “the chemin de fer continues”:

He is successful there, and at 2:45 he enters a the high-rollers room:

It’s difficult to say for sure how much he wins there, but by 3:30 he has attracted a crowd of onlookers:

And not long after that, he’s tipping the croupier one million francs at a time:

Based on the stacks of chips in shots like this, it appears that Bob’s winnings total nearly as much as the 400 million francs he and his crew are expecting to make from robbing the casino. Suddenly he chances to look at his watch and sees that it’s 5am:

He shouts, “change all this, now!” and sprints to the entrance, but it’s too late: the police, tipped off by Jean and his wife (Colette Fleury) and an informant (Gérard Buhr) armed with details that Paolo carelessly let slip to Anne, are waiting for Bob’s crew when they arrive and Paolo dies in the shootout which ensues:

Bob arrives just in time to cradle his protege in his arms as his life expires:

As Inspector Morin places Bob and Roger in handcuffs, one of his officers removes a coin from Bob’s pocket that we saw him flipping earlier.

“I’ve known it was double-headed for ten years,” Roger tells him. “And I’ve known you knew for ten years,” Bob replies. “Paulo knew too,” he adds. Just then the somber mood is broken by a procession of bellhops bringing out Bob’s winnings:

“And don’t let any of it go missing!” Bob says as he is led into a squad car. “Criminal intent to commit . . . you’ll get five years,” Morin says as he offers Bob and Roger cigarettes.

“But with a good lawyer, you might get away with three years,” he continues. “With a very good lawyer, and no criminal intent, maybe an acquittal!” Roger adds. And finally Bob: “If I play my cards right, I might even be able to claim damages!” The movie ends with a amazing shot of his car sitting in front of the Deauville shore as the sun rises behind it:

Dave Kehr writes in an essay that appears in his book When Movies Mattered that “[director Jean-Pierre] Melville is often described as an existentialist, but to execute a scene like the finish of Bob le Flambeur, even in jest, you need to have some faith in the basic benevolence of the world–some faith in a higher, protective power, such as the ‘luck’ that Bob turns his back on and that then returns, in the end, to save and reward him after all.” I couldn’t agree more with the first part of this statement, but would quibble just a bit with the latter. Bob never *abandons* Lady Luck; rather, ever the gentleman, he tries to take a hint and move on when it seems like he has lost her favor, but when he realizes his error, he’s more than happy to come home. As the voiceover remarked earlier as the seconds ticked down to 5:00, “that’s Bob the gambler as his mother made him!” I noted last February in a post about The Young Girls of Rochefort that a friend has suggested that the theme of this series is “the human experience of trying to become a better person.” I suppose that must make Bob le Flambeur another exception to this rule.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

Between Valentine’s Day in February and Easter in March/April, I think it’s fair to say we’re in the “chocolate quarter” of the calendar year! In honor of such, this is the first of three Drink & a Movie posts in a row that will feature a drink made with one of my favorite underrated heroes of the back bar: crème de cacao. As Paul Clarke notes in The Cocktail Chronicles, its bad reputation is likely attributable “the substandard quality of many chocolate liqueurs” prevalent on the market until Tempus Fugit Spirits’ version became widely available about ten years ago. It and the Giffard white crème de cacao that I prefer in the 20th Century cocktail I wrote about in 2022 for reasons of color are both excellent, though, and there’s no longer any use to shy away from this ingredient. As described in a post on his blog, Clarke created this month’s drink, the Theobroma, as his version of a chocolate martini. Here’s how to make it:

2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Mi Campo)
1/2 oz. Punt e Mes
1/4 oz. Bigallet China-China
1 tsp. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)
2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

The Theobroma begins with orange on the nose and an impression of sweet and bitter on the sip which quickly comes into focus as agave and chocolate. “Definitely a tequila drink,” said My Loving Wife, and I wouldn’t want to use something much more assertive than Mi Campos, which in my opinion is currently the best value in the reposado category available here in Ithaca, NY. It is rested in wine barrels, which contributes vanilla flavors also prominent in Tempus Fugit’s crème de cacao that come through on the swallow along with spice and more orange. Clarke’s description of his concoction as “a bold, elbow-throwing mixture that’s unafraid to let its chocolate flag fly” is spot-on, and I’m not going to try to improve on it!

Believe it or not, the chocolate martini was created by actors Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the movie Giant. The book Rock Hudson: His Story contains the tale:

Rock and Elizabeth stayed in rented houses across from each other, and it was in one of those houses on a Saturday night in 1955 that they invented the chocolate martini. They both loved chocolate and drank martinis. Why not put chocolate liqueur and chocolate syrup in a vodka martini? They thought it tasted terrific and made a great contribution to society until they began to suffer from indigestion. “We were really just kids, we could eat and drink anything and never needed sleep,” Rock said.

Given these origins, what better film to pair with the Theobroma than a riff on the Rock Hudson vehicle All That Heaven Allows that hails from Germany, “the land of chocolate,” and involves stomach problems as a plot point? I am, of course, referring to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD:

It is also streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription, can be rented from a variety of other platforms, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

As Klaus Ulrich Militz writes in his book Personal Experience and the Media, the relationship between Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and All That Heaven Allows “is not as clear as it may seem at first.” For starters, although both films revolve around a May-December romance, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder must have conceived of his movie before he encountered its supposed inspiration for the first time in autumn 1970 because “a rough outline of the film’s story-line is told by the chambermaid in the film The American Soldier,” which he shot two months earlier. The fact that his protagonists Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) enter into a relationship with each other at the beginning of it also represents a major structural break with the earlier movie directed by Douglas Sirk, which “largely follows the emancipatory logic of the melodramatic genre because his heroine only gradually manages to overcome her passivity before she eventually commits herself to her lover.” Nonetheless, per Militz, “the fact remains that when Fassbinder eventually made Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 1973 this was done under the impression of Sirk’s films.”

One place many people feel the influence of All That Heaven Allows is in Fassbinder’s use of color. For instance, in her chapter for the book Fassbinder Now: Film and Video Art, Brigitte Peucker observes that the “formal, conformist grey clothing” that Emmi and Ali get married in marks them as “constrained by the social order,” but that it’s offset “by the Sirkian red carnations that emblematize emotion”:

This seems to echo what Brian Price describes in his chapter for the book A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder as the typical reading of the vibrant red dress Jane Wyman’s Cary Scott wears in Heaven to show “what remains inside and–owing to social constraints–invisible.”

As he notes, though, Emmi’s flowers are different in that “Fassbinder’s colors, unlike Sirk’s, tend toward disharmony and away from the kind of color coordination that makes analogy possible.” Pointing out that the man Cary is with in the image above, Conrad Nagel’s Harvey, is wearing clothing that matches the furniture they are sitting on, Price argues that this provokes a simile: “Harvey, we might say, is like a couch, something to rest on, something solid but soft, immovable–and worst of all for Harvey, something inanimate, or merely functional.” Contrast this with the dresses Emmi favors elsewhere in Ali, such as the one she has on as she sits “in front of an amateur painting of horses running executed in pale yellow gold tones decidedly less bold than the ones Emmi wears” and curtains “which are no less busy than her dress but are nevertheless discordantly situated with respect to it–baby blue instead of navy blue, a dull grayish green instead of the saturated green to which it stands, in the overall composition, in odd contrast”:

To Price “the contrast eludes metaphor” and because “this green is not like that green, then Emmi cannot be defined by the objects and spaces that constitute her on a contingent–and thus reversible–basis.”

My Loving Wife explained to me that this is also a wrap dress like the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg, which per this Time Magazine article she created “for the kind of woman she aspired to be: independent, ambitious, and above all, liberated.” Fascinatingly, it also states that “von Furstenberg was told from a young age that ‘fear is not an option.'” The similarity of that quote to the title of this month’s movie may be just a coincidence, but Emmi’s fashion sense surely isn’t, especially when you consider how many of these garments she has in her wardrobe:

Fassbinder similarly uses the television and frames within frames that appear in Heaven, represented here by a single powerful camera movement:

As a launchpad to do his own thing. He transforms the TV from a would-be prison cell into an symbol for the respectable German family that Emmi’s son Bruno (Peter Gauhe) believes she has disgraced with her choice of husband:

Meanwhile, almost every other aspect of the film’s mise-en-scène is a cage. This includes the wedding where Ali and Emmi celebrate their wedding:

The apartment and bedroom where Ali seeks solace (and couscous!) after his relationship with Emmi calcifies into yet another instrument of exploitation:

The stairwell where Emmi eats lunch alone after being shunned by her charwomen:

Then, once back in their good graces, joins them in giving the cold shoulder to their new co-worker Yolanda (Helga Ballhaus), a Herzegovinian immigrant:

And a shot-reverse shot of a nosy neighbor (Elma Karlowa) watching Ali and Emmi mount the stairs of her building that, Manny Farber writes in an essay collected in the book Negative Space, “suggests all three, like all Fassbinder’s denizens, are caught in a shifting but nevertheless painful power game of top dogs and underdogs”:

But my favorite aspect of Ali is reminiscent less of Sirk than something Richard Jameson once said about the movie Once Upon a Time in the West. He described it as “an opera in which arias are not sung but stared,” and that’s a perfect fit for this film as well! You can practically hear the thoughts of Asphalt Bar proprietress Barbara (Barbara Valentin) as she sizes up Emmi, who has appeared in her establishment for a second time hoping to find Ali:

And those of the waiter (Hannes Gromball) at the restaurant “where Hitler used to eat from 1929 to ’33” (!) as he contemplates his unusual customers:

“Sometimes, long silences seem to be an expression of the social hostility encountered by Emmi and Ali, as in the climactic scene in an outdoor cafe immediately before their regenerative vacation,” notes James C. Franklin in a Literature/Film Quarterly article called “Method and Message: Forms of Communication in Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf“ (the movie’s German title) where “the interaction of the visual image and the silence creates an atmosphere of utter coldness and hostility”:

However, my favorite examples of where (as Franklin eloquently puts it) “there is much to be heard in the silence of the soundtrack” are the looks Ali and Emmi give each other the morning after he first comes back from a night out blackout drunk:

And then doesn’t arrive home at all:

The latter occur in the film’s final ten minutes. In a response to a chapter in Robert Pippin’s book Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher for the national meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics that he posted on Letterboxd, Matt Strohl comments on a phenomenon that he calls the “double ending” of subversive melodramas whereby “an ostensible happy ending is subverted by some unsettling element, which might then prompt us to reflect on whether it was really such a happy ending after all and to reinterpret the film in this light.” Although All That Heaven Allows concludes with Cary resolving to “come home” to her lover Ron (Hudson), both scholars argue that we should feel uneasy about this, Pippin (as paraphrased by Strohl) because Cary “did not make the decision to enter into this relationship” but rather “fell into it because of Ron’s newfound need for a caretaker” and Strohl because “Cary has not gotten over her fears and become a full-fledged agent, but rather has slid into a different socially-defined gendered role that she has not actively chosen.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a different kind of beast. The scene after the second staredown depicted above opens with Ali “gambling away a week’s wages” (as Barbara points out to him) at the Asphalt Bar:

He busts out and sends a friend to his place for 100 more marks. While he waits for the money, Ali goes to the restroom and proceeds to slap himself in the face multiple times in a weird twist on Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats freshening-up routine in The Hustler:

As he sits back down at the table and immediately proceeds to lose a hand, Emmi enters the bar in the background:

Barbara brings her a Coke, the drink she ordered the night she met Ali, and Emmi asks her to play the tune they later danced to. Ali and his companions stare at Emmi as Barbara selects the song on the jukebox in the foreground of a three-layer composition:

As soon as the music begins playing, Ali stands up and asks Emmi to dance. As the sway back and forth he confesses that he has slept with other women, but she assures him the it isn’t important and that he’s a free man who can do as he likes. “But when we’re together, we must be nice to each other,” she says. “Otherwise, life’s not worth living.”

“I don’t want other women,” he responds. “I love only you.” Suddenly, he collapses to the ground, moaning in pain:

The final scene takes place in a hospital. “He has a perforated stomach ulcer,” a doctor (Hark Bohm) tells Emmi. “It happens a lot with foreign workers. It’s the stress. And there’s not much we can do. We’re not allowed to send them to convalesce. We can only operate. And six months later they have another ulcer.”

“No he won’t,” Emmi insists. “I’ll do everything in my power. . . . ” The clearly skeptical doctor interrupts her: “Well, the best of luck anyway.” Emmi walks over to Ali and the camera tracks in on their reflection in the mirror:

The doctor closes the door:

And the film ends with a shot of Emmi crying as she holds an unconscious Ali’s hand:

The utility of the “double ending” for Strohl is that it can explicate an otherwise inchoate sense that “there’s something off” about a Hollywood ending. There’s obviously no need for that here, but if broaden this concept and reinterpret it through the lens of the drink writing idea of a “finish,” it can also give voice to whatever lingers in your mind after the final credits have rolled. Ali‘s finish is the same as the Theobroma’s: they’re both bittersweet, which, if you don’t think that’s appropriate to the Valentine Season, you’ve never really been in love.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.