The main difficulty with BOB LE FLAMBEUR, a mediocre film widely credited with being a key antecedent of the French New Wave, is that Roger Duchesne, our supposedly romantic anti-hero, resembles Leslie Nielsen (looking stern, thoughtful, and constipated) so closely that I kept wondering if I'd rented a NAKED GUN comedy by mistake, but the loud, jarring musical score and the cornball phoniness of the gunplay scenes don't help either, so the exalted status of BOB LE FLAMBEUR must be due to the stylish black-and-white cinematography, the clever plot, the snappy dialogue, and the fact that Isabelle Corey (whom Melville spotted on the sidewalk when she was 15 and immediately implored to audition for the part of Anne) is hot enough to melt a critic's heart.