As he walks in the early dawn at the beginning, he looks into a tarnished mirror, a further visualisation of the difference between one's self and one's role, identity etc. In an extraordinary long shot, the road-sprayer that circles Bob is echoed in the circular shapes of a nearby park, echoing the circles of the film, the vicious circle Bob gets trapped in, the circles of the casino, the cycles of life. He watches as Anne is picked up by an American motorcyclist - Bob as helpless observer; the movie will dramatise the various ill-fated ways in which he will try to move from passive to active,to stop being a pawn of fate;the frequent unmotivated angle shots undermine this.

Like all Melville's films, this is not the story of a gangster, but a dismantling of all the concealed codes, ideologies, assumptions, of the gangster, of masculinity, of Hollywood cinema.One of the ways 'Bob' breaks with traditional cinema is in its anti-Oedipal bias.A conventional film often uses an Oedipal trajectory,usually showing an immature hero's moral progress,often defeating an older figure, taking his place and power, and winning the girl. This is a necessary process of continuity for the social order. And this seems to be fulfilled here, as Paolo, who hero-worships Bob, obeying him like a father, takes his place, takes his girl, takes his apartment to have the sex Bob can't have anymore, even using Bob's gestures.

Bob is a shadow of himself, de trop in his own home. As it should be. The subsequent narrative could be seen as an attempt of Bob's to regain his identity and power, and to emasculate Paolo.This sublime film is full of little twists of the norm like this. Isabelle Corey is unprecedented among all film heroines, her amoral, seemingly indifferent sexuality far more suggestive and powerful than her contemporary, Bardot's - her fulfilling her femme fatale role does not result in tragedy any more than Bob's fulfilling his gangster role does.