JEAN GABIN: The Actor Who Was France, Evolution of modern film- No passport necessary.
Here is an interview to air in November with Joseph Harriss about JEAN GABIN and his significance as artist and as a public figure, an "everyman" who came to personify France.
Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France
The first biography in English of the
iconic French film actor whose career
and life mirrored both 20th-century
France and the early evolution of modern film.
When Joseph
Harriss published The Tallest Tower:
Eiffel and the Belle Epoque, it was acclaimed as a definative book and it was written by an American. Now, the Paris based journalist has done it again with a different kind of icon in Jean Gabin: The
Actor Who Was France (McFarland). Illustrated with more than 40 photographs,
the book portrays in graphic detail Gabin’s
films and personal life, including his unhappy years in Hollywood and his largely
unknown wartime service as a tank commander with the Free French.
This full-length biography, the first in English,
shows how Jean Gabin,
whom Harriss sees as “a French Everyman,” embodied the spirit of the French
people, much as John Wayne embodied American values. Gabin's “tragic drifter”
character in his great classics of the late 1930’s was tough yet fated to lose,
mirroring a France facing the German invasion of 1940. Later, Gabin’s
film character was often dismayed by postwar cultural change, as France's
unique character was progressively homogenized
by the European Union and
globalization.
His persona as “patriarch” in the 1960s marked the culmination
of a 45-year, 95-film career that made him a worldwide screen idol (it is
calculated that his post-WW II films alone
attracted some 161
million moviegoers.) At his death in
1976 The New York Times called him “the craggy and sardonic hero-victim
of a hundred French films. . . one of the great men of cinema.”
Jean-Alexis Moncorgé entered show
business as a song-and-dance man at the Folies Bergère in the 1920s. He went on to do operetta and then talkies in the
1930s, rising to stardom as Jean Gabin just before World War II. Refusing Nazi pressure to act in German
films, he fled occupied France to Hollywood, where Darryl Zanuck eagerly signed
him for Twentieth Century Fox. But, notoriously
cantankerous and independent, he detested the town’s rigid, autocratic studio
system. He did only two films there
before returning to join Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces to fight for the
liberation of France.
It's a dramatic personal and professional trajectory as Gabin
grew, matured and evolved, thanks in part to his three marriages and often-painful
love affairs ranging from the 1930s French beauty Mistinguett to
Ginger Rogers, Michèle Morgan and Marlene Dietrich. But there was much
more to him than his massive presence and the captivating pale eyes so admired
by Jean Renoir. The emotional depth of his internationally renowned 1930's classics, like Grand
Illusion, Pépé Le Moko, and La Bête Humaine,
directed by filmmakers such as Renoir and Marcel Carné, led the great French
film critic André Bazin to call him “the tragic hero of
contemporary cinema.” Bosley Crowther of the Times saw Gabin then
as “the Spencer Tracey of French films . . .
obviously one of the best slap-‘em-and-kiss-‘em actors in the game.”
Harriss shows that Gabin's success was due not only the
instinctive naturalism of his acting, but also to his habit of revising
screenplays to improve the film and sculpt his role to his advantage. This
while working with legendary screenwriters like Jacques Prévert
and Michel Audiard. His dogged insistence that only a good story can make a
good film later resulted in his being scorned by 1960s Nouvelle Vague auteurs
such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France is a penetrating, serious but not solemn portrait of a complex
personality, the actor whom the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York once
called “Everybody's Star." It is a book to be savored not only by Gabin fans, but also students
of cinema history and lovers of France itself.
I knew little about Gabin but really liked that I learned both about WW2 in Europe before the Americans and what the music halls and our vaudeville contributed to the nascent film industry. Before the Actor's Studio, Gabin had figured out how to underplay for the camera and to pare plots for maximal focus, movement, and personal exposure. Though without formal education, Gabin's instincts were ahead of his time. His personal force shaped the new medium and what we see today.
But perhaps fitting for a French icon, his suffering was deep and ironic. He was undone by 1960s New Wave Auteurs, who resisted his vision as "old hat" and controlling, he escaped the Nazis for Hollywood, only to be treated as a "French" product. Gabin who loved women and spent a fortune in pursuit, found none, until later in life, willing to have his children.
I could see why huge crowds mourned his death, and today a museum and street are dedicated to his memory. If you love film and France, read about Gabin, rent a couple films. Escape the cliches of 2018 in the U.S.A., no passport necessary.
But perhaps fitting for a French icon, his suffering was deep and ironic. He was undone by 1960s New Wave Auteurs, who resisted his vision as "old hat" and controlling, he escaped the Nazis for Hollywood, only to be treated as a "French" product. Gabin who loved women and spent a fortune in pursuit, found none, until later in life, willing to have his children.
I could see why huge crowds mourned his death, and today a museum and street are dedicated to his memory. If you love film and France, read about Gabin, rent a couple films. Escape the cliches of 2018 in the U.S.A., no passport necessary.
S.W.
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