BY DANIEL BAIG | Jean-Pierre Grumbach loved American things.

He loved the American writer Herman (Moby Dick) Melville, and so when he became a filmmaker, he renamed himself Jean-Pierre Melville -- which he sometimes shortened, in the credits of his movies, to just "MELVILLE." He loved American crime movies, and so when in 1955 he made his own tough guy film noir, Bob Le Flambeur, which is currently touring the U.S. in a newly restored print, he in some ways used as a guide, with a Gallic twist, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. He loved American cars, and so his noble anti-hero Bob drives around Paris in a huge boat of a 50's Plymouth convertible.

Influences beget influences. First, close to home, Bob Le Flambeur and other Melville movies had a huge impact on the then not-quite-yet-nascent French New Wave, especially Godard (especially his Breathless, in which Melville appears as the famous novelist Jean Seberg and the other reporters interview) and Truffaut.

Further afield, geographically and chronologically, directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and John Woo have cited Melville as a profound inspiration. (Woo especially credits Melville's famed 1967 Le Samourai, which was re-released here in the U.S. some years back; he's called it "a perfect film.")

Even moviemaking giant Steven Spielberg, about to unveil his own film noir in Minority Report, has proclaimed his ardent admiration for Bob.

Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and upcoming Adam Sandler-starring Punch-Drunk Love writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson clearly is a great admirer of Bob Le Flambeur, as his first feature film, Hard Eight (also known as Sydney, and featuring Mace Windu himself, Samuel L. Jackson, and Gwyneth Paltrow) is strongly indebted to Bob, right down to cribbing distinctive camera movements.

And then as I sat watching this great-looking new print of Bob, I all of a sudden was struck by a feeling of dij` vu:

A charismatic ex-con comes up with a grand scheme to attempt a heist so ambitious nothing like it has been attempted before -- robbing a casino, on the day of a big sports event when its safe will be filled with an enormous amount of money. In combination with a longtime friend, he sets about making the plan reality. First, they meet with an eccentric older rich guy who'll be the one to bankroll the considerable expenses entailed -- including the latest high tech equipment for robbing safes. Then more members of the team are recruited, so that there are, including the leader and the funder, eleven in all. The robbery is first explained to the crew by the idea man in a lecture in which he uses visual aids like big representations of the casino's floor plan. Then it's practiced, on the outskirts of town, in a full-scale mock-up of the actual location. There's also the matter of a girl . . .

Sound familiar?

Am I describing Bob Le Flambeur? Yes. Could I also be describing the recent Ocean's Eleven? Why, most definitely yes. During some of Bob's scenes, I kept using my finger to count all the guys on the screen, just to make sure that I wasn't wrong about them actually adding up to eleven.

Like Ocean's Eleven, Bob Le Flambeur is a fun movie. (Though, of course, being a French film, and a noir film, it doesn't end quite as happily as Ocean's. Also, regrettably, to my mind, Bob uses that old standby, the treachery of women, as a catalyst for tragedy; this isn't quite made up for by the film's one sympathetic woman character ((she's outnumbered by a shrew and an amoral, albeit sexy, little thing)).)

It's also an incredibly shot film, beautiful to behold at times. The black and white cinematography by Henri Decae is fantastic.

One shot in particular lingers in my mind, an overhead view of a nighttime boulevard, lined with streetlights. The lampposts' tight clusters of glowing bulbs, sending out haloes of light in the inky darkness, gleam like bouquets of pearls.

The camera work can just be admired for its skill, but if you feel like it, you can also seek out meaning in it: for example, two times in the movie we see our honorable yet fatally flawed titular protagonist look straight into a mirror. In both cases, the surface sending back his reflection is flecked with dirt.

Bob Le Flambeur also has going for it a terrifically good, cooler-than-cool jazz soundtrack, much of it performed as part of the action in the many scenes set in the clubs of the Parisian district of Montmartre in which most of the movie is set.

If you saw and loved last year's Amilie, by the way, with its digitally-and-otherwise cleaned up, spotless and sunny Montmarte, you really owe it to yourself to see that famed neighborhood as it was in the 50's -- seedy, underworld, and "open all nite."

Rialto Pictures, the company responsible for so many of the big event restored new prints of classic films seen in recent years (Godard's Contempt and Band Of Outsiders, Fellini's Nights of Cabiria and Juliet of the Spirits, Jules Dassin's Rififi, Bu/uel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, and the currently highly visible P?p? Le Moko, are the people behind this new Bob. They've released it on a Criterion Collection DVD, but it's always wonderful to see beautiful films like this where they were meant to be seen, on the big screen. You can check out their website to see if it's playing near you anytime soon.

If you live in the Los Angeles area, Bob Le Flambeur is showing in an exclusive engagement, through this Thursday only, on the giant screen of the Egyptian Theatre. If you go see it there, you'll get the eminently enjoyable unadvertised bonus of seeing, before the feature attraction, two hysterical, over the top original theatrical trailers for two movies from the Egyptian's forthcoming Japanese Outlaw Masters series.

Oh, if you're wondering about the meaning of the title, it translates as Bob the High Roller. Technically, I guess it literally means "Bob the Flamer" -- but that would most definitely be giving the wrong idea.