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| Martin Roumagnac: the poster image of Il Cinema Ritrovato (2019) with Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin. This title film was not screened. |
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| Jean Gabin nella sua fattoria (coll. La Cinémathèque française). Photo from the catalogue of Il Cinema Ritrovato. |
Peter von Bagh (2006):
Jean Gabin was the greatest French star of the 1930s, “the actor of the century” in a longer perspective, as he was voted in a poll of Le Parisien in the 1990s, and “a sovereign expression of France in the full glory of its contradictions” (Pascal Jardin). He acted in 95 films during 46 years, and his career was divided into two sharply distinct periods (first the 1930s and then from 1945 onwards, separated by the years of emigration in the United States where the star did not manage to grow roots). Sometimes it has been said that Gabin can do only one thing, “exist on the screen quite like he is in real life”. According to Jacques Prévert he was “the incarnation of unaffectedness”. Jean Piverd added that he “was not really an actor but a force of nature”.
The first films starting in the year 1930 were a continuation of Gabin’s operetta career, but with the director Julien Duvivier he began to develop into “the tragic hero of contemporary cinema”. Since the middle of the 1930s Gabin was the great actor of tragic populism – the sum of his age and the dominant figure in its best movies. The most glorious period takes place during the years 1935–1940. Gabin turned down dozens of roles; he only wanted to film with his trusted friends, and in turn the talent of the screenwriters and directors close to him helped his star image crystallize into myth.
The 1930s in France were a period of great stars on a level that has hardly been surpassed. Nevertheless Gabin rose higher than all the others as a myth and as a star, and besides he was also a great actor (according to Renoir the greatest). Gabin was also an “auteur” in the sense that he supported good projects – he staked his prestige, reputation and box office status enabling films by Renoir, Carné and Grémillon to be produced in the first place. We may remember that all significant producers rejected La Grande Illusion which was made only thanks to Gabin’s patient networking.
Gabin’s starting-point was that other people’s thoughts, talent and emotions corresponded with his own. A tight circle of close pals included Dudu, Le Gros, Le Môme – that is: Duvivier, Renoir, Carné, each of whom signed one or several unforgettable key interpretations: La Bandera, Pépé le Moko, and La belle équipe by Duvivier, Les Bas-fonds, La Grande Illusion and La Bête humaine by Renoir, and Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève by Carné. The populist mood and honesty of the era merged in a unique fashion with the essence of the star / actor / myth who was wired like an electrical conductor to basic themes and signs of the times. Gabin was equally grand as a soloist (La Bête humaine, Le Jour se lève), in love scenes (with Michèle Morgan in Le Quai des brumes), with a buddy (the escape with Dalio in La Grande Illusion), and in ensemble portraits (La belle équipe). He was no different from the rest but part of the common soil.
Talking about La Bête humaine Jean Renoir emphasized that Gabin was utterly ordinary in the blue overalls of the engine driver, wearing a beret, and mouthing everyday phrases as Jacques Lantier. Nevertheless he achieved, again quite inconspicuosly, the tragic in the classical sense of the word.
A certain obsession has to be mentioned because it reveals at once the way of thinking of an assertive star. André Bazin explains:
“Before the war, it is said, Gabin insisted before signing any film contract that the story include one of those explosive scenes of anger at which he excels.”
“Was this the whim of a star, was it the ham clinging to his little touch of bravura? Perhaps, but he probably felt, through his actor's vanity, that to deprive himself of it would betray his character. Indeed it is almost always in a moment of rage that Gabin brings misfortune on himself, baiting the fateful trap that will inevitably cause his death.“
“Besides, in the tragedies and epics of ancient times anger was not just a psychological state amenable to treatment by a cold shower or a Gardenal pill; it was a state of unconsciousness, a trance, a divine possession, a cleft opened for gods into the world of humanity, through which destiny steals.”
At the start of the war Gabin emigrated into Hollywood and even made movies there, which are hardly ever played anywhere; the Hollywood atmosphere was incommensurate with Gabin’s essence, his need for independence, his convictions. When after the war Gabin’s long-cherished project Martin Roumagnac – made together with his wartime lover Marlene Dietrich – was watered down having been ripped away from Carné’s team and when Gabin himself let Les Portes de la nuit slip from his hands he wandered in the wilderness for almost a decade, at a loss with his image, identity and audience in France.
Gabin was only forty-something when France was liberated, but he soon started to seem clearly older and more mature: experience and years in exile weighed heavily. He kept hand-picking roles and managed to turn down the blockbuster which The Wages of Fear proved to be, although one may ask whether the loser role portrayed by Charles Vanel would have fit him. Hardly. And that is the point. Gabin’s choices may not have delighted cinephiles but commercially and perhaps from the viewpoint of myth-making he did not fail. And fortunately Gabin’s period in the fog is brightened by “events” such as René Clément’s Au delà des grilles (1949), Carné’s La Marie du port (1950) charged with elementary power and especially Henri Decoin’s Simenon masterpiece La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (together with Danielle Darrieux).
Gabin’s career can be seen as a masterful reflection on two completely contradictory social strata, each with a separate challenge.
First Gabin embodied a worker or a marginalized citizen who cannot find peace in the world governed and manipulated by the bourgeoisie, the church and the army. He reflected the age of demoralization both in his star persona and his innermost self – what happened to the working class, what happened to the workers and in the background to the bourgeoisie during the period that led to the humiliation of the year 1940 – reflecting the inner substance of the crisis he was a actor-seismometer beyond compare, recording the confused condition of an entire class. These portraits of proletarian professions, lonely marginalized criminals, victims of hereditary alcoholism, suicidal losers and deserters of the 1930s vanished after the war as if they had never existed.
They were replaced by the upper echelon of the social order: the banker (Les grandes familles), the industrialist (La Vérité sur Bébé Donge), the ship-owner (La Marie du port), the wealthy farmer, the doctor, the surgeon, the lawyer, and the high-end criminal who has a family to support and who conducts his business like an industrial magnate.
The “embourgeoisement” of the latterday Gabin proceeded at an even pace with his audience. The former rebel of the 1930s was now a “patriarch” of the Right, the head of big families in the city or in the countryside, among the grande bourgeoisie, and although he played both criminals and policemen, the common factor was the power at his fingertips with which he dominated the situations and the big picture of the society. When other actors played parts in a plot, Gabin embodied things quasi directly and intuitively. With Gabin directors were compelled to work “against the image, not the narrative”.
Before my account turns too withering it must be qualified by examining the truly remarkable movies which nevertheless materialized especially in the 1950s.
Two glorious roles appeared in period pieces: the Norman peasant in Le Plaisir and the theatre producer in French Cancan. The ageing landowner whose fields are energized by a swarm of charming sex workers on vacation from Maison Tellier to visit a relative’s First Communion is full of vitality and practical wisdom of life – the middle episode of the Maupassant movie takes place in a perfect state of happiness and grows into a hymn to open-mindedness, ready to accept humanity in all its shades…
French Cancan (1955) is a study in artistic production and the beginning of mass entertainment. Danglard, the producer of cancan – “the metaphor representing all artistic endeavour” – knows how to present the beautiful mirage of luxury to the masses. It is essential to discover ideas among the people, and there is no better clue than love. Thus besides the show business theme French Cancan is also an all-encompassing presentation of another intoxicating subject, love: bought, real, sensual, human skin, love of art and the arts, and especially the greatest of the arts, life.
The present, however, prevailed. The crime film Touchez pas au grisbi…, “undoubtedly the most Hawksian of all French films” (Jacques Lourcelles) is extremely precise, elegant in its contours and easy-going in a meditative way. A lot of care is devoted to little manias of people, each and every one’s characteristic way of looking, almost unnoticeable gestures. Stardom means also this: an entire generation of viewers remembers how Gabin approaches the jukebox to play his favourite tune once and once again.
Notable is also Claude Autant-Lara’s La Traversée de Paris (1956), an account of Paris such as it was during Gabin’s years of emigration in 1940–1944. The vision is ruthless as is the portrait of the self-made man of the black market days: a conceited, selfish, nasty and greedy bourgeois and small capitalist whose fortunes have accumulated quite nicely during the circumstances of war and occupation. Bourvil, the comedian, creates in the other leading role an equally fine interpretation and he is charismatic enough to avoid being swallowed by the force of Gabin. For certain writers such as Raymond Borde this role was “Gabin’s last true creation”.
A key person is the writer Georges Simenon. In the 1950s Gabin acted four times in films based on his texts. The Maigret films and two others were followed by more in later decades. This prestige helped Gabin bulldoze a firm standing as the undisputably best-known Maigret impersonator.
Around the year 1955 a kind of a routine spreads into everything that Gabin does. According to Autant-Lara, the director of the unforgettable La Traversée de Paris, Gabin was hardly any longer an actor but “a personality”, “always the same”. This could not have been said in the 1930s.
The young François Truffaut cracked soon after The 400 Blows – his point of argumentation was about getting stuck into clichés – that he could not consider working with the following five actors. They were “too dangerous” in their habits: Fernandel, Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe, and Pierre Fresnay. According to Truffaut they did not hesitate to interfere in casting and refused to accept certain co-stars. They also influenced directing and demanded big close-ups of themselves. They did not hesitate to sacrifice a film to their own position. “Thus they are in my opinion directly responsible for several failures”.
In this phase Gabin was no longer cast into movies just like that. Even Jacques Becker is known to have considered for a long time François Périer for the lead of Touchez pas au grisbi. Much had to be reconstructed, and thus Gabin became more and more a “product” of a team: Jacques Audiard wrote dialogue, Louis Page took care of lighting, Jacques Colombier was the art director, Jean Rieul was in charge of the sound – all this was, yet again, recorded in the actor’s contract.
However – as time would tell – Gabin’s films were yet again an anthology of themes and genres in fashion. It is a matter of record that he, ironically enough, beat the “nouvelle vague”, hardly any of whose movies were financially successful. Pierre Billard states that Gabin had a special “power radar” with which he sensed dominant styles, genres and themes.
This did not mean that the orientation was simple and mechanical. The atmosphere was now more cynical, morals more lax, violence often indiscriminate and meaningless. Even Gabin committed things that could no longer be associated with the pure and clearly defined character of the 1930s whose moral absolutes radiated with his marginal status.
Billard mentions an example. In Le Désordre de la nuit (1958) the police inspector sleeps with a girl from the drug milieu to further his investigations. Previously it would have been out of the question that Gabin would have even taken the role of a policeman, and in a way he never played a criminal, either, since even Pépé le Moko is rather more a philosopher of his outsider condition.
In the background of social themes, business and crime also private matters loomed. A special phenomenon of the 1950s was the psychological drama characterized by a meticulous, accurate and logical developent of emotions in the spirit of the traditional novel. This was emphatically a domain of the actors’ cinema also for women. Furious wives incarnated by Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan, Madeleine Robinson, and Edwige Feuillère were a counterweight equal to Gabin, who stood like an oak amidst the morass of slackening manners and mores and marital dramas.
A well-known exception to the routine of the late period is Le Chat (1971), another Simenon adaptation, this time with Simone Signoret as the co-star. The solitude and the horror of marginalization between wife and husband who hate each other to a monstrous degree create an impression even more chilling than the 1930s movies about self-destructive undertakings of 25-year-olds. But even Le Chat has its hooks: maybe it is a hidden love story?
The movies of the 1950s are largely unbearable, and on the whole may seem mechanical, but there is another side, well expressed by Yves Boisset: “… if you view today ‘the collected works’ – films directed by Audiard, Denys de la Patellière, Grangier – you discover to your amazement a very interesting general overview of the French society (…) These movies have undoubtedly been needlessly harshly vilified: Razzia sur la chnouf is not a bad movie, Maigret voit rouge is a good movie, Voici le temps des assassins… is a pure masterpiece. A pessimistic and cruel vision of a certain world and a certain society is reflected in these movies… and in the context a tint of anarchism, leaning more to the right than to the left. Gabin was an ideal mouthpiece for this kind of ‘nanar’ cinema.”
When Gabin died in the year 1973 the instant revelation was that he was – a comparable figure could only have been someone like De Gaulle – equal to “the very idea of France”. The actor had already for a long time been elevated into the rank of statesman both figuratively – in 1936 he was photographed next to Maurice Thorez, in 1972 together with Georges Pompidou and actually, or to quote Theodore Zeldin:
“Actors are as significant as politicians as reflections of the public opinion, and perhaps even more so, since audiences are ready to pay in order to see them live through problems which are real also for themselves (…) Speaking about film stars is not secondary or different from the image which people have of themselves”.
Peter von Bagh, from: Tähtien kirja [The Book of the Stars]. Helsinki: Otava, 2006. Translated by Antti Alanen for Il Cinema Ritrovato (2019).
[There are also 17 Jean Gabin data and comment boxes in the book, omitted here.]
This is the complete version of Peter von Bagh's article. An abridged version was published in the Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019 catalogue and on its website.
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