February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“The Good Thief,” a casino heist film shot in the South of France, tends to fall into the latter category and is Jordan’s first remake of an existing feature.
The film is based on the 1955 heist movie “Bob Le Flambeur,” written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, a classic French crime caper and an homage to the B-movie noir flicks churned out by the dozen in the studios of 1940s Hollywood and much admired in mid-20th century France. “Bob Le Flambeur” is still screened in revival houses on a regular basis and is regarded by film fans as a bridge between the pulp noir flicks from which it freely borrows and the edgy films made by the next generation of French film directors who followed Melville in the early 1960s, inspired by the same material: Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais.
The heist venue for “Bob Le Flambeur” is a casino in Deauville on the decidedly unglamorous Normandy coast of Northern France, while Jordan’s is the ritzy Nice locale, and the tone of Melville’s wintry black-and-white film is relentlessly downbeat.
“The Good Thief” reunites Jordan with Chris Menges, the director of photography from his 1982 debut feature “Angel,” which was released in this country as “Danny Boy.” In the intervening years, Menges had gone on to win two Oscars for best cinematographer for “The Mission” and “The Killing Fields,” and assisted Jordan once more on his epic Irish Civil War drama, “Michael Collins.”
Another longtime Jordan collaborator on the new film is Elliot Goldenthal, composer of the soundtrack for “The Good Thief,” his fifth score for the Dublin-based director.
Conspicuous by his absence from the cast is Stephen Rea, Oscar nominated for his performance in Jordan’s “The Crying Game” in 1992, and a staple in half a dozen more Jordan films from his earliest work through his last feature, “The End of the Affair.”