'Bob The Gambler'

If this film has any real fault, it's the name. Essentially Bob the Gambler in translation.

It really doesn't tell you much about the film itself. It's like retitling A Streetcar Named Desire something like Stan the Sadist, or Citizen Kane like Rosebud the Sled. There is so much they could've done to workshop the title.

Overall, it's a good film. A bit of a film noir and part French New Wave. About a good-hearted gambler, down on his luck, who plans the heist of a casino. The plan blows up -- basically, the players tell their girlfriends and wives and that never, ever works out ... ever -- and Bob winds up going on an unexpected winning streak at the table and forgets all about the heist.

He is escorted into a police car as they load his winnings into the trunk.

The director is Jean-Pierre Melville, a Jewish Alsatian, who joined the French Resistance once the Nazis took control and the Vichy government was installed. It was during the Resistance that he took the surname of Melville in honor of his favorite American writer.

During his time in the Resistance, he participated with Operation Dragoon, the very understated Allied invasion of the south of France during World War II, more than two months after D-Day and the invasion of Normandy. The Resistance were credited for cutting off communications among the German forces on the coast and helping with the relative ease of the operation as the Nazis were caught completely unaware.

After the war, he kept his adopted surname for the rest of his career.