"The Good Thief"

That devil-may-care spirit is entirely Neil Jordan's contribution. You won't find it in "Bob le Flambeur." Jean-Pierre Melville is a hard director to make up your mind about. I enjoy the gloomy fastidiousness of his gangster films like "Le Samourai" and especially "Le Cercle Rouge," which is currently making its way around the country in the only complete version that has played here, and which I'd take over Jules Dassin's "Rififi" any day. But if you've seen Melville's hothouse adaptation of Jean Cocteau's novel "Les Enfants Terribles" it's hard to resist a sneaky suspicion that in his dedication to genre films Melville was consciously working beneath his capabilities. He wasn't a born genre filmmaker, as the deliberation and self-seriousness of his crime dramas show. He wanted to invest them with more import than they could bear (import that doesn't feel like a stretch in a movie that's at home in the genre, like the great noir "Out of the Past").

"Bob le Flambeur," from 1956, is an obvious link between the professionalism of '50s French cinema and the more poetic approach the New Wave directors took to the crime genre, in François Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player" and Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless." (In that film, Godard drops a reference to the hero of "Bob le Flambeur," and Melville himself appears as the author who says his greatest ambition is "to become immortal and then die.") "Bob le Flambeur" is a terrifically enjoyable movie even if its doomed romantic fatalism feels like an inevitable and predictable sop to the genre. The movie is the product of an intellectualized infatuation with Serie Noire paperbacks, '40s American noir, and the luxuriant self-pity of Edith Piaf songs.

Essentially, Melville was indulging himself in a form of weepy cabaret while, here, Neil Jordan is making jazz. There's a playful springiness to the movie that keeps any hard-boiled sogginess at bay. You hear it in some of the movie's lightning-fast exchanges. The actors aren't talking noticeably fast; they just live in a world where everyone functions at the same syncopated tempo. The wit of the dialogue sometimes catches you on the rebound.

The best movie Jordan made previous to this, "Mona Lisa," did not escape a certain noirish sentimentality. That didn't hurt the picture. You wanted it to be a gorgeous, sad song, like the Nat King Cole number it was named after. "The Good Thief" is, like "Mona Lisa," a noir reverie, but one that sees through the sop in which noir can revel. My gut tells me that, for all the darkness noir brought into standard Hollywood sunshine, it also brought another form of sentimentality in disguise. The best noir films escape conventional morality, but much of the genre often makes just as sure as conventional Hollywood movies ever did that bad people, no matter how much we liked them, get punished.

"The Good Thief" is cheerfully guilt-free about our fascination with thieves and our complicity in wanting to see them get away with it. The photography by Menges (himself the director of such films as "A World Apart," "Second Best" and "The Lost Son") is so warm and beautiful that it feels like we're being flattered just sitting in our seats drinking it in. Menges is such a master of lighting that even the scummiest dive-bar backroom has a palpable glow. Nolte's house, with its peeling walls, exudes an air of chic decay. And the beauty Menges gives the surroundings extends to the actors' faces, which feel both utterly individual and as iconic as anything in a Sergio Leone film.

You bask in the landscape of faces. First there is Gérard Darmon, whose long, pointed mug makes him look something like a chiseled French Fred Gwynne. Then there's Bosnian director Emir Kusturica, a hirsute, doughy presence who turns up as a security expert involved in the heist for the sheer pleasure of defeating his own security system. (Kusturica might be auditioning to succeed Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid in the "Harry Potter" series).

There's a lot of good acting throughout the movie. As Bob's young protégé Paulo, who falls in love with Anne, Saïd Taghmaoui (he was the Iraqi soldier who tortured Mark Wahlberg in "Three Kings") has a baby-faced softness. When his anger and jealousy threaten the entire heist, you feel as if you're watching the outburst of a heartbroken little boy. And young Georgian actress Nutsa Kukhianidze is just about the most charming presence the movies have seen in the last couple of years. She seems all limbs, with her exquisitely long neck and bowl haircut giving her head the shape of a delicate mushroom. She speaks in the most extravagantly bored deep voice since Eszter Balint sang the praises of Screaming Jay Hawkins in Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise."

Jordan has been very smart to conceive of Anne as an essentially good-hearted tough cookie. He gets rid of the misogyny of his source. When a young woman betrays the hero of the Melville film it's for no reason other than honoring the noir convention of woman as duplicitous Eve. Some of this movie's most intricate plotting -- and some of the way it confounds expectations -- centers on Anne, and Jordan doesn't do either his character or his actress wrong, allowing Kukhianidze to make her way through the movie like a languid breeze.

The biggest acting surprise comes from Ralph Fiennes, who shows up in two scenes as a shady dealer in stolen art and who has more sexiness, vitality and presence than he's ever shown. It's Fiennes who encapsulates the movies when, assessing a Picasso painting and pointing to its borrowings from Ingres and Modigliani, gives it the accolade, "He was a good thief." The movie is an ode to the joy of thievery, both for the characters and for Neil Jordan. He's lifted Melville's movie, as well as the lurid and glamorous conventions of noir, to pull off his own ingenious heist. Johnny Hallyday may know how to rock but here he gets it wrong. Noir isn't quite noir in "The Good Thief." It's more like a creamy cup of hot coffee with a shot of good bourbon on the side -- invigorating, relaxing and ending with a warm mellow kick.

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