The Prodigal Cinephile

I didn’t conceive of it as such, but my “Drink & a Movie” series is a fair approximation of my personal cinema and cocktail canons because (predictably, in retrospect) I have mostly chosen to write about my “go-to” directors and ingredients and scenes and techniques, the ones I’ve spent the most time thinking about and which have therefore played the biggest roles in shaping my point of view as a cinephile and drinker. My tastes are constantly evolving, though, and to conclude my three-post-long celebration of crème de cacao I’ve selected two new discoveries from the past few years.

Shortly after I watched Black Sheep for the first time, I talked about it first in an “Ithaca Film Journal” home video recommendation as “total catnip for me,” then again a few months later in my “Top Ten Movies of 2023” post as “the most fun I had with a movie all year.” Here’s a picture of my bare-bones 20th Century Fox “Cinema Archives” DVD copy:

Unfortunately, although I originally saw this film on the Criterion Channel as part of a collection called “Directed by Allan Dwan,” it doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere right now.

One of the things I found so delightful about Black Sheep are the old-school drinks heroine Claire Trevor’s Janette Foster orders: she asks for, in sequence, crème de menthe, a crème de menthe frappé, and Dubonnet. I wanted to offer a more complex alternative to Janette’s usuals like I did with the sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist ordered by Andie MacDowell’s Rita Hanson in my Drink & a Movie entry for Groundhog Day, and I quickly settled on the Chapuline, a delightful variation on the grasshopper created by Toby Maloney of Chicago’s The Violet Hour. He specifically calls for green crème de menthe, but does so while making a joke related to presentation: “the white pales in comparison.” I’ve never been able to find the bottle by Marie Brizard he recommends and every verdant variety that *is* available in Ithaca tastes unbearably artificial in comparison to Tempus Fugit Glaciale, so that’s what we went with. In addition to tasting much better, I submit that it also looks just fine in this yellow glass we picked out to serve it in. Here’s how we make it:

1 oz. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)
1 oz. Crème de menthe (Tempus Fugit)
3/4 oz. Pisco (Macchu Pisco)
1 oz. Heavy cream

Shake all ingredients vigorously with ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a spanked (to release its aromas) fresh mint leaf.

As he notes in The Bartender’s Manifesto, Maloney’s goal was “to prove that [he] could take a gauche drink and make it at least interesting, at best delicious.” Mission accomplished! The first thing you notice is its beautifully silky texture. The flavor that pops is peppermint immediately followed by chocolate–the effect would be almost exactly like eating a York Peppermint Pattie except that there’s also a burn which resolves into grape on the finish, as if the drink was morphing from a grasshopper to a stinger, the other classic cocktail most commonly associated with crème de menthe. You wouldn’t get this with a barrel-aged spirit like cognac, obviously, so the choice of pisco is quite brilliant!

Maloney’s recipe includes instructions to shake “like it owes you money,” which is actually a pretty excellent segue into discussion of Black Sheep since income, like the film’s camera movements, represents both freedom and confinement for its protagonist John Francis Dugan (Edmund Lowe) and the other characters. As Frederic Lombardi writes in his book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, “the opening shots of the film give a full sense of the great breadth of the ship Olympus but as the story unfolds, there are increasing attempts to restrict the space in which Dugan can move, so that he must literally know his place.” To start at the beginning, an introductory montage provides a tour of the ship’s first-class spaces:

Before the gliding camera comes to rest on this sign:

And then goes tumbling down the stairs:

Moving at a much faster pace than it did earlier, cinematographer Arthur Miller’s camera now repeats its double-exposure trick to show us we’ve been taken down a notch to second class:

Before it finally stops on a sign and cuts to Dugan playing solitaire:

In just the first of many examples of what Fernando F. Croce calls Black Sheep‘s “limpid storytelling,” our logical assumption that he must be one of the sharps that the people on board the Olympus are cautioned to be wary of is confirmed by the two shots which follow him looking up from his game at his fellow denizens of the second-class smoking room.

First a woman indignantly responds to her companion’s suggestion that they play bridge for a tenth of a cent per point by saying, “I should say not! I lost 55 cents at a twentieth last night. I’ll play for a fortieth or nothing.”

Then one man responds to another’s suggestion that they play checkers by saying, “I don’t mind if you don’t play for money.”

Dugan shakes his head and returns to his game, but is soon distracted by an offscreen clicking noise which a quick tracking shot soon reveals to be caused by Foster’s vain attempts light a cigarette:

And with that we’re off and running! Foster’s lighter doesn’t work because it isn’t supposed to: “that’s how I meet so many nice people,” she informs Dugan. It’s a toss-up for me whether the *very* best thing about Black Sheep is the dialogue by director Allan Dwan (who wrote the story that the movie is based on) and screenwriter Allen Rivkin or the chemistry between its stars, who David Cairns brilliantly describes as “so delightful together you long for a whole season of Thin Man type romps for them to connive through (as he says, “sometimes film history just misses a trick”) although these things are of course related. The snappy one-liners come fast and furious right from the start: when Foster asks if she can buy Dugan a drink, his reply is “I don’t know, can you?” A few beaters later she labels them “two good mixers with no ingredients.” Then a bit further on after the two sneak upstairs to “see how the rich people live,” Dugan condenses a whole lifetime of back story into just a handful of sentences. “There are two things that always floor me,” he tells Foster, “horses and dames. One keeps me broke, the other crazy, and you can’t depend on either of them.” When she quips, “don’t tell me a horse jilted you!” he replies in kind: “yes, and a girl kicked me.”

But then he adds: “that was twenty years ago. Forget it.” Speaking of coin flips, in addition to sharing a profession in common with the main character of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection Bob le Flambeur, Dugan similarly uses them as an external signifier of his deference to the Fates:

“Dugan and Foster stay in business,” he says after this one, referring to the partnership they have entered into to help a young man named Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) they observed getting fleeced in poker during their upper deck sojourn who also, as it happens, turns out to be Dugan’s son. This fact is revealed in a moment that Matt Strohl describes as “an emotional bolt of lightning in the middle of the film” which occurs after Dugan has helped Curtis win back some of the money he lost to Eugene Pallette’s and Jed Prouty’s buffoonish oil tycoons Colonel Upton Calhoun Belcher and Orville Schmelling by posing as his friend, but only at the expense of his own profits when he is forced to accept the checks Curtis wrote them as payment or risk giving up the ruse. He’s right in the middle of getting tough with Curtis (“I’ve got $1800 coming from you and I want it–in cash”) when suddenly he spots a set of framed photos:

“What’s the matter?” Curtis asks him after he notices the older man’s reaction:

“Oh, nothing, nothing–I probably had too much to drink or something,” Dugan stammers. He gives no further explanation, but immediately changes his tune regarding repayment. “Where’s that note for those rubber checks?” he asks, then looks on with what my daughter Lucy would call a “thin smile” while Curtis writes it:

As Strohl notes, although Dugan never reveals his discovery to Curtis even through the end of the film, “that one reaction scene reverberates and lends weight to everything that follows,” including what I think must be the romantic non-kiss in the history of cinema. It takes place about halfway through a 30-second-long shot that begins right after the coin flip depicted above when Dugan notices Foster’s hand on the lapel of his bathrobe:

They put their arms around each other and lean in, but suddenly he pulls back:

It’s just for a second and they lean in again, but the result is the same:

Foster is already smiling as he lets out a perplexed sigh and is laughing by the time he calls for the steward to “take this lady out of here”:

Destiny can bring lovers together but in my experience the key to a happy marriage is that you have to really like each other! Dugan is clearly wondering what the heck happened to him and there’s work still to be done, so the wedding bells will have to wait, but these two clearly have a future together and he’s earned it. And that brings us right back to where we started! The steward appears in this scene because Dugan is supposedly under lock and key, and as Lombardi notes “restriction of movement is a severe violation for a Dwan character and film,” but Dugan “uses his room arrest to serve his ends.” In other words, all those attempts to put Dugan in his place ultimately fail, which is another connection between him and Bob Montagné: they both remain true to themselves no matter how down and out they find themselves and are eventually rewarded. Which now makes three “exceptions to the rule” I wrote about in my February Drink & a Movie post about The Young Girls of Rochefort, suggesting that it’s time to update my notion that “the human experience of trying to become a better person” is a theme of this series. After all, resisting the temptation to change more than you need to can itself be a challenge. Which, come to think of it, is the secret to the Chapuline’s success, too, isn’t it? Toby Maloney elevated the grasshopper by tweaking its proportions just a bit and adding one single ingredient. Or, to reframe this in terms that Dugan and Bob (and Kenny Rogers) would appreciate, sometimes the highest form of wisdom is knowing how to quite when you’re ahead.

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.

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.