Jean Gabin: World's Coolest Movie Star

It's 2012: Happy New Year from www.JeanGabinBook.com!

2011-12-29T14:54:00.000-08:00

By Charles Zigman,
Author,
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO (Allenwood Press). www.jeangabinbook.com

January 1, 2012

I hope everybody had a very nice summer, fall, and end of 2011. I can’t believe it has been five months since I updated this blog site with new Jean Gabin information. Thank you again for buying my book WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO. The newly revised edition of the book – I’ve re-written 20 + chapters from scratch and I've made changes in almost every other chapter (and I'm just about finished) -- should be available in 2012 or 2013.

There has been quite a bit of really interesting Jean Gabin news to report over the last five months, and I am duty-bound, as the author of the Gabin book, to report it to you. (Also, I enjoy reporting it to you). So here it is:

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES’ JEAN GABIN MARATHON HAS COME AND GONE:

This past August 18th, as I had reported in my most recent blog, Turner Classic Movies presented the very first Jean Gabin Movie Marathon in the history of American television. Thirteen great films were screened over a period of twenty-four hours, including Gabin’s internationally acknowledged classics – Pepe Le Moko, La Grande Illusion, La Bete Humaine, and Le Jour se leve – plus many films which have either never been screened in the U.S., or haven’t been screened in the U.S. for at least fifty years, movies like Le Desordre et la nuit, L’Air de Paris, Remorques, and Des gens sans importance – in fact, one of the films, a terrific little noir from 1953 called Leur derniere nuit had never been screened in the U.S. at all, so this TCM screening effectively served as its North American premiere, some fifty-eight years after it was made.

Needless to say, it was a great pleasure to see these wonderful films exhibited on American television, all in new, digitally restored presentations – although my one gripe, is that TCM’S Ben Mankiewicz, who hosted a few of the films that were screened in primetime – Pepe Le Moko, La Grande illusion, and Touchez pas au grisbi – continually mispronounced Jean Gabin as "Jean GabON," and he also referred to Jeanne Moreau as ‘JEENE’ Moreau, and he pronounced the title of Gabin’s 1953 film Touchez pas au grisbi as Touchez PAZ -- as in Paz Vega -- au grisbi. However, these mispronunciations notwithstanding, it was wonderful that these films were shown, and I was happily surprised when, after the 8:00 pm screening of Gabin’s powerful Emile Zola adaptation La Bete humaine, Mankiewicz mentioned my book.

Wow: I have just discovered this great YouTube clip. A Gabin fan has made a video montage of posters from all 95 of Jean Gabin's feature films, many of them original. I have never even seen some of these posters myself. He even includes posters for the three "missing" Gabin films -- Adieu les beaux jours (1932), La Foule hurle (1932), and L'Etoile de Valencia (1933). The music behind the clips is Ennio Morricone's theme for Gabin's powerhouse 1969 Mafia/heist epic, The Sicilan Clan.

A ONE-HOUR RADIO BIOGRAPHY OF JEAN GABIN PREMIERED ON GERMAN RADIO, ON NOVEMBER 6th, 2011:

This past November 6th, producer/film professor Christian Buckard, who is based in Berlin, presented his all-new, one-hour Jean Gabin biography on the German radio channel SWR2, and the program includes a rare, new interview with 91-year-old Michele Morgan, Gabin’s co-star from four excellent films – Le Recif de corail (1939), Le Quai des brumes (1939), Remorques (1941), and La Minute de verite (1952). (Gabin and Morgan also appeared in director Sacha Guitry’s misguided 1955 epic Napoleon, although they do not share any scenes in that film.) Buckard’s radio program also deals with the torrid relationship between Gabin and Marlene Dietrich and, as it has been mentioned many times on this blog site, and in my book, Dietrich, who dated thousands of people, had always considered Gabin to be the main love of her life.

Here is a link to a German-language article about the radio program, which also contains a few minutes worth of excerpts from the broadcast, as well as an interview with Christian Buckard regarding the making of the show:

http://www.swr.de/swr2/programm/sendungen/feature/-/id=659934/nid=659934/did=8650498/285vy0/index.html

The one-hour program will be repeated in April or May of 2012, and at this time, Dr. Buckard promises that there will be a link, so that you will be able to listen to the entire one-hour broadcast on line, in its entirety. And when you listen to it, please tell me as much as you can about its contents, since I don’t speak German! (PS, Dr. Buckard asked me if there are any English-language radio stations that might subsidize an English-language translation of the show; I don’t know anything about the radio world -- I thought about NPR, but NPR didn't return my calls! -- but if you do, feel free to email me at author@jeangabinbook.com, and I will pass the information on to Buckard.)

Here's the cover of the new album "Chimes at Midnight," by the Canadian band Scars and Scarves. Track #3 is called, "If Gabin Doesn't Die (Then the Movie's No Good)."

"IF GABIN DOESN'T DIE (THEN THE MOVIE'S NO GOOD)": A CANADIAN BAND'S NEW SONG IS INSPIRED BY JEAN GABIN!

In previous posts, and in my Gabin book, I mentioned that there are two current Italian rock bands, "Gabin" and "Bebe Donge" which are named after Jean Gabin ("Bebe Donge" is named for Gabin's 1952 film, La Verite sur Bebe Donge), and that there is also a French rapper of Senagalese descent, who goes by the name of MC Jean Gab1. But as of this month, there is a new edition to the world of musicians who are inspired by The World's Coolest Movie Star:

On December 16, 2011, the Canadian band Scars and Scarves released its first album, "Chimes at Midnight," an eleven-song dynamo in which each (beautiful, haunting) song references a certain classic film, film genre, or artist. The title of the album is also the title of Orson Welles' 1966 Falstaff epic, but what's important to this blogsite, is Track #3, a tune called "If Gabin Doesn't Die (Then the Movie's No Good)," a reference to the fact that in Jean Gabin's best movies, the pre-War Poetic Realist pictures of the mid-to-late 1930s -- La Bete humaine, Le Quai des brumes, Le Jour se leve, and Remorques -- Gabin's tragically fated characters always die at the end. The album is the brainchild of the band's movie loving frontman Garrett Sordi-McClure (songwriter, guitar, lead vocals) and his wife, Annalea Sordi-McClure, and it's a beautiful piece of work, one which honors not only classic filmmaking, but also excellent music.

Besides the song about Jean Gabin, I also want to mention the album's Track #2, which is entitled "For Henri Alekan." It's inspired by Alekan (1909-2001) the internationally famous cinematographer who photographed Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Clouzot's Wages of Fear, and Wenders' Wings of Desire, not to mention two Jean Gabin films in the 1950s -- La Marie du port and Le Port du desir. During World War II, a thirty-one year old Alekan was captured and imprisoned by the Germans, and when he escaped, he started his own resistance movement! If there's anybody deserving of a song named after him, it's Henri Alekan!

Want to hear the album in its entirety? You got it:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Scars-Scarves/141936089246902?sk=app_204974879526524

And here's a link to a new interview with the band's frontman Garrett Sordi-McClure:
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/music/music-previews/music-inspired-by-orson-welles-8542/

OVER THE LAST FIVE MONTHS, SIX MORE JEAN GABIN MOVIES HAVE BEEN SUBTITLED INTO ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Over the last year-and-a-half or so, as I have mentioned in previous postings, some twenty of Jean Gabin’s movies have been issued on DVD, subtitled into English for the very first time, and these DVDs have been made by fans: Thanks to recent digital technology, as I have mentioned in other posts, some savvy, Gabin-loving movie fans have been purchasing French-language Gabin films – as well as other non-English-language films which do not have English subtitles – creating their own digital English subtitles, ‘marrying’ the subtitles to the picture, and producing their own English-subtitled DVDs, most of which are of extremely high quality. The fans trade or sell these ‘fan-subtitled DVDs’ on auction and classified ad sites like eBay.com, iOffer.com, and ecrater.com.

Since my last blog posting, six additional Jean Gabin movies have been newly subtitled into English:

First, there’s is director Marcel Carne’s La Marie du port (1950), in which Gabin’s waterfront hotel owner falls in love with his fiancee’s (Blanche Brunoy's) much younger sister (Nicole Courcel). I’m not sure if this is one of Gabin’s better films – it tends to be a bit sluggish – but it is of interest to Gabin completists, because it is the first film which Gabin made for director Marcel Carné since the two men had teamed up on the incredible Le Quai des brumes, eleven years before. The film is set in the northern port of Le Havre which, of course, was also the setting of Gabin’s 1938 classic, La Bete humaine. Of course, it's well-directed and Gabin is quite good in it.

La Marie du port (1950) is classic soap opera: Jean Gabin is the owner of a seaside resort who falls in love with his fiancee's younger sister -- she's 18 and he's 46 (just the way the Good Lord intended)! Little sis won't drop trou for our Gabin, so he ventures upstairs, where he discovers her big sister -- his fiancee -- in bed with younger sister's hairdresser boyfriend.

The second newly-English-subtitled release this season is extremely entertaining: It’s the 1957 actioner Le Rouge est mis, directed by Gilles Grangier, in which Gabin and his cohorts heist a factory’s safe and run from the cops. It’s a fast-paced look at the workaday world of the gangster, and it re-teams Gabin with another legendary French icon, the former boxer Lino Ventura, who plays a hood as volatile as is Joe Pesci in Goodfellas..

The third, fourth, and fifth newly-English-subtitled Gabin releases, comprise the exciting three-film trilogy in which Gabin plays author Georges Simeon’s legendary, pipe smoking Inspector Maigret, and for those who don't know Simenon and Inspector Maigret, author Simenon's Maigret books are to the francophone world what Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are to anglophole readers. In Film #1, Maigret tend un piege (1957), Inspector Maigret is called upon to deal with a baby-faced killer (Jean Desailly) who may or may not be butchering short-coiffed women all over Paris, and the film also stars Lino Ventura as well as the stunning Annie Girardot. Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), Maigret must deal with the murder of a Countess, and everyone in her household staff is a suspect. Finally, in Film #3, the fast-paced, jazz-infused Cinemascope offering Maigret voit rouge (1963), Gabin goes up against a group of American Mafiosi who are freshly arrived to Paris from St. Louis, Missouri – and in case you forgot, or in case you never knew, St. Louis, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s was a hotbed of the Italian-American Mafia, so much so that Senator Kefauver tried to stop it when he spearheaded his infamous 'Kefauver Hearings.'

Maigret voit rouge (Maigret Sees Red, 1963), never theatrically released in the United States, is one of six Jean Gabin films which have newly been subtitled into English. You can catch its North American, English-subtitled premiere on the cable channel TV5 Monde, on January 27, 2012. In this scene, some American hoods follow Gabin's inspector Maigret into a bar, so he calls down to HQ for backup.

But really, “The Jean Gabin Find of the 2011,” is a newly-English-subtitled print of 1932’s Les Gaites de l’escadron, or Fun in the Barracks, a brisk, hilarious, slobs-in-the military farce that pre-dates movies like M*A*S*H and Stripes by forty and fifty years, respectively. Gaites, an ensemble film, presents us with a platoon full of hilariously ragtag misfits who laze around, during World War I, waiting, in vain, to get called to the front. The film has quite a pedigree, because not only do we get to see a very young (age 28) Jean Gabin, playing a surly private -- a private who, like other Gabin characters, is not afraid of authority -- but he is teamed up with his real-life lifetime friend Fernandel, the great, horse-faced French movie comedian who had himself starred in 150 movies during a career which spanned around forty years. The first-billed star of the movie, however, is the corpulent, and singularly-monickered Raimu -- he plays the unit's hapless, and ultimately good-hearted sergeant -- who was France’s number one box-office draw of the early thirties immediately before younger actor/stars like Gabin and Louis Jouvet arrived on the scene, and Gaites is also of interest because it was directed by Maurice Tourneur, the father of Jacques Tourneur – and Jacques Tourneur, of course, moved to America in the 1940s, where he gave the world great classics like Cat People and Out of the Past.

Even though, by the time Les Gaites de l’escadron was made, young Jacques Tourneur had directed a few films of his own, including the previous year’s light comedy Tout ca ne vaut pas l’amour which had also featured Gabin (this title is not yet available with English subtitles), he was, at his father Maurice's behest, the credited film editor of Gaites. And not only does the film have a great pedigree both behind and in front of the camera, but it is notable for yet another reason: About half of the movie is presented in a very early color process, applied during post-production, called Pathé Stencilcolor, a process which pre-dated the similar looking computer colorization of the 1980s, the difference being that every frame of Les Gaites de l’escadron was colored by hand, and it looks a lot better than computer colorization. (After the film had finished production, the producers knew, correctly, they had such a big hit on their hands, they decided to add color to about half of the film, most notably during a few parade sequences and a vaudeville sequence.)

The best place to acquire your English-subtitled DVDs of Le Rouge est mis, La Marie du port , Maigret tend un piege, and Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre, is from a seller on the internet auction site www.ecrater.com – just do a search for each film by title, or by the film’s seller, “Movie Detective” (Chris), who is based in Los Angeles.

If you live in the U.S. and Canada and you like French culture and French movies, you should think about adding the channel TV5 to your cable line-up... it's available through most cable systems for about $10 per month. TV5 shows a lot of English-subtitled French movies, from the '30s through today, that have never been subtitled before, plus a lot of other great programming. It is utterly worth it.

TV5 MONDE ETATS UNIS: A FEW WORDS ABOUT A GREAT FRENCH-LANGUAGE/ENGLISH-SUBTITLED TELEVISION CHANNEL THAT IS AVAILABLE THROUGH MOST U.S. CABLE PROVIDERS:

The English subtitles to the Jean Gabin films Les Gaites de l’escadron and Maigret voit rouge were not, unlike the other films I have mentioned, made by fans. Les Gaites de l’escadron premiered on October 28th, 2011 and Maigret voit rouge will make its English-language, North American premiere on January 27, 2012, on the cable channel TV5 Monde Etats Unis, which is available as an optional ‘add-on’ channel, for around an extra $10 per month on most North American cable providers – Dish Network, DirecTV, Time-Warner, etc. If you are a fan of French movies, you might really want to add TV5, anyway, because every month, the channel is subtitling even more great genre films from the 1930s up through today into English and broadcasting them to North America, sometimes at a rate of three or four films per month. Besides Les Gaites de l’escadron, Maigret voit rouge, and other Jean Gabin pictures -- Le Chat, La Traversee de Paris -- TV5 has recently broadcast retrospectives of the comedian Louis de Funes and Yves Montand, and the channel even presented, just this past November, a pretty incredible 1946 film called L’Etoile sans Lumiere, or Star without Light, a film of which I had never heard, but which is now, nevertheless, burned into my retinas and corneas forever; L'Etoile sans lumiere is kind of a French Star is Born, but with more edge than the American versions, and it is also one of the few films to star Edith Piaf, who sings in the film. TV5 also presents a lot of wonderful English-subtitled programming, including great news programs, a show I saw in which great American/N.Y.-based authors (Jay MacInerney) were interviewed by a French journalist, and a one-hour special dealing with the censoring of some Marvel Comics in France. You should definitely subscribe to TV5 Monde Etats Unis, if you're not receiving it already. (PS, I don't want to give short shrift to UK-based Jean Gabin fans: If you live in Great Britain, you are eligible to receive a cable channel called Cinemoi -- www.cinemoi.com -- which, like TV5, presents English-subtitled French movies -- including Jean Gabin's movies.)

If you don't feel like adding TV5 to your cable channels, check with Chris, www.ecrater.com's "Movie Detective," because he might have DVDs of those films, recorded from TV5, even if he is not listing them. If he doesn't have them, also do a search for those titles at eBay.com and iOffer.com. Eventually, somebody is usually selling them, and there are new sellers every day.

So how about that – since my last entry six months ago, six more Jean Gabin movies are now available for you to see with English subtitles.

At a Serge Gainsbourg tribute concert, held on August 28th at the Hollywood Bowl, artists performed music from two Jean Gabin movies, Le Pacha and La Horse.

AUGUST 28, 2011:
HOLLYWOOD BOWL CONCERT TRIBUTE TO FRENCH MUSIC LEGEND SERGE GAINSBOURG INCLUDED SELECTIONS FROM TWO JEAN GABIN FILMS.

On Sunday, August 28th, as the summer came to a close, the Hollywood Bowl honored the legendary French musician, and sometimes filmmaker and actor, Serge Gainsbourg, who passed away prematurely – at the age of sixty-two, in 1991 – with his very first ever American tribute concert. While Gainsbourg, like Jean Gabin, has always been treasured throughout Europe, he continues to remain a cult figure in the U.S., although he is definitely appreciated by the musicians who performed his rock and jazz songs, and his scores to famous French movies, at the Bowl concert – including Beck and his band, Sean Lennon with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp-Muhl, Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Zola Jesus – she’s kind of very talented Russian Lady Gaga – Victoria Legrand (daughter of French composer Michel Legrand), and the young actor Joseph Gordon Levitt, and Levitt, like Mike Patton, was able to capture Gainsbourg’s signature gravelly voice to perfection. It was eerie and great.

Aside from writing and recording his own great music, Gainsbourg was involved in three of Jean Gabin’s later films. Gainsbourg, as an actor, portrayed a party photographer in a wonderful color comedy that has never been released in the U.S., 1966’s Le Jardinier de l’argenteuil . In the film, Gainsbourg portrays a ‘groovy’ Austin Powers-like photographer on a hippie party boat, whom Gabin stares at with horror. As a musician, Gainsbourg composed music for two additional Jean Gabin films, 1968’s actioner La Pacha (The Showdown) and 1970’s La Horse.

I was over the moon when Gainsbourg’s musical contributions for La Pacha and La Horse , two films which continue to be unknown in the U.S., were played at the Hollywood Bowl concert: Near the beginning of the show, Mike Patton performed a searing cover of Gainsbourg’s 1968 hit, “Requieum pour un con” (“Requiem for a Jerk”), which Gainsbourg himself had performed in the Le Pacha:

Here is Gainsbourg performing "Requiem pour un con" in the film Le Pacha, in which he turns up as "himself," and watch for Jean Gabin the end of the clip! In the film, Gabin's police inspector is searching for a murder, and one of the suspects is Gainsbourg's drummer!

Also at the Hollywood Bowl concert, Beck’s band, sans Beck, performed Gainsbourg’s signature opening credit score for Jean Gabin’s 1970 thriller La Horse, a ruthlessly entertaining vigilante film which pre-dated Charles Bronson’s Death Wish by four years.

Here is Gainsbourg's original version of the theme from La Horse, from the film's original soundtrack album:

GABIN’S CO-STARS WERE STILL GOING STRONG IN 2011:

A few of Jean Gabin’s legendary co-stars were still "going strong” in 2011, and “going strong” aptly describes French superstar Gerard Depardieu, who made the news a few months ago for micterating – per the Coen brothers in Big Lebowski – on a plane. I am mentioning Depardieu here, because in the ‘70s, a twentysomething Depardieu made his screen debut in two Jean Gabin films, 1973’s L’Affaire Dominici, a really outstanding true story that has never been released in the U.S., and 1974’s taut drama Deux hommes dans la ville, which is readily available on an English-subtitled DVD through Kino Home Video.

Speaking of Depardieu, there is a charming new 82-minute film which opened in L.A. and N.Y. at the end of the summer. It's called My Afternoons with Margueritte (La Tete en friche), and not only does this new film star Depardieu, but it co-stars him with 97-year-old Gisele Casadesus, who played Jean Gabin’s wife in the 1974 film Verdict, and Verdict, of course, also happened to have been the only film to team Jean Gabin with Sophia Loren. The Casadesus family is very famous in the world of French acting – they are similar to the Barrymore family in the U.S. or the Redgrave Family in the UK – and My Afternoon with Margueritte is directed by 77-year-old Jean Becker, who has directed a mere fourteen films since 1961, one of his earliest and best titles being 1964’s very fun widescreen caper comedy Echappement Libre, which re-teamed Breathless’s Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. (Jean Becker also happens to be the son of Jacques Becker, who directed Jean Gabin's 1954 film noir sensation, Touchez pas au grsibi.)

In My Afternoons with Margueritte, Gerard Depardieu is an illiterate man who befriends kindly senior Gisele Casadesus. It's a very good film -- much less cloying than the inspid trailer would lead you to believe (why have American movie trailers become so treacly?), and much better than moviedom's previous adult illiteracy epic, the 1990 weepie Stanley and Iris, which starred Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda. (Remember the cringe-worthy bit where Jane Fonda tells De Niro, "That's the library," and De Niro responds, "It's MY library!")

Another magnificent co-star of Jean Gabin's, the luminous French actress Micheline Presle, 90, who co-starred with Gabin in a very good caper comedy, 1960’s Le Baron de l’ecluse (Baron of the Locks) – in that film, she and Gabin played Deauville-based grifters in that proto–Dirty Rotten Scoundrels comedy – stars in a new, Belgian-made mock-documentary called Hitler in Hollywood, directed by Frederic Sojcher, which made its North American premiere at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, on Wednesday, September 21, 2011. In Hitler in Hollywood, Presle, playing herself, is on a quest to find a missing film she made when she was younger, and this leads her to a very sinister discovery. Like Jean Gabin, Micheline Presle, an actress who was discovered by G.W. Pabst when she was a young ingenue, deserves to be more known in the U.S., and on line DVD vendors sell what many consider to be Presle's best film, director Jean Gremillon's 1953 weepie L'Amour du femme, in which she portrays a city doctor who is transferred to the country. (In that film, Presle even performs a graphic hernia surgery in a lighthouse, during a violent storm!) L'Amour du femme is a very early feminist film, in which Presle's character is forced to choose between love and career in what was, at the time the film was made, considered to be a very revolutionary way. You can find fan-subtitled versions of L'Amour du femme online, and Gremillon, who directed it, helmed two Jean Gabin features, Gueule d'amour and Remorques.)

Here is Micheline Presle with Pulp Fiction's Maria de Medeiros in the new film Hitler a Hollywood (2010):

And here is Ms. Presle with Jean Gabin in Le Baron de l'ecluse (1960):

Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich, Los Angeles, 1942.

Florence Moncorge and Mathias Moncorge, Jean Gabin's kids, photographed 9/2011.

GABIN’S KIDS ON FRENCH T.V.:

I almost forgot to mention that my friend Laurence Bardet, in Paris, reported to me that, on Friday night, September 16th, Jean Gabin’s adult children, Florence and Mathias Moncorge, appeared on France’s Television 3, alongside actor Laurent Ferra, co-hosting Ferra’s favorite Jean Gabin/Alain Delon heist film from 1963, Melodie en sous-sol (Any Number Can Win). Florence and Mathias reportedly talked with Ferra about what it was like to grow up as Jean Gabin's children, and you can find a very good English-subtitled DVD of Any Number Can Win on Amazon.com. (It was issued a few years ago by Image Entertainment, and it's currently out of print, but you can occasionally find copies on eBay.)

LATE BREAKING NEWS:

Finally, as I am about to "go to press" with this posting, I have just learned that, on October 26th, France's Television 2 premiered a ninety-minute Gabin documentary, directed by Serge Khalfoun, entitled Jean Gabin: Un Jour, Un Destin (Jean Gabin: One Man, One Destiny), a look at Gabin's life when he wasn't in front of the camera, including an examination of his sojourn in the Free French Navy and Army.

In my next blog posting, whenever that will be -- at the rate I’ve been going lately, it could be five years from now! -- I hope to be able to uncover some new behind-the-scenes information with which I have recently become acquainted regarding Moontide, Gabin’s American-made/English-language film from 1942. If you are a fan of Jean Gabin, and of Salvador Dali (You gotta love Midnight in Paris: "I am Dali!"), get ready for something relentlessly cool.

Thank you for reading this blog posting, and thank you, yet again, for supporting my book WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUME ONE (ISBN 978-0-9799722-0-1) AND VOLUME TWO (ISBN 978-0-9799722-1-8).

Charles Zigman
www.jeangabinbook.com

Gentlemen (and Ladies) Start Your TiVo's: Turner Classic Movies Presents a 24-Hour/13-Film Jean Gabin Marathon on Thursday, August 18th, 2011

2011-08-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

Turner Classic Movies 24-Hour/13-Film Jean Gabin Marathon, on Thursday August 18th, 2011, features the North American premiere of the actor's fast-paced 1953 crime drama Leur derniere nuit (Their Last Night). Columbia Pictures produced this film specifically for the French market.

If you live long enough, everything happens:

This Thursday, August 18th, for the first time in the history of American television, a twenty-four hour/thirteen-film Jean Gabin Marathon is happening on Turner Classic Movies. When you see this great French actor's films, you will immediately understand why I spent more than ten years writing and researching a two-volume biography and filmography of Gabin, World’s Coolest Movie Star (www.jeangabinbook.com).

Turner Classic Movies has even designed a new, temporary Jean Gabin website, in honor of this historic day. The website reflects Gabin's boyhood interest in trains, as well as the fact that he had portrayed train engineers in two films, 1938's La Bete humaine (The Human Beast) and 1950's La Nuit est mon royaume (The Night is My Kingdom). If you click on the title of this article, you will be immediately whisked away to this website.

In America, Gabin – Europe’s #1 movie star of all time – is today principally known only for a small handful of movies: 1937’s double-header of La Grande illusion and Pepe Le Moko, 1938’s La Bete humaine, 1939’s Le Jour se leve, and 1954’s Touchez pas au grisbi. Those five films will be a part of TCM's Marathon, as well as seven additional Gabin films which have not been screened with English subtitles, or presented in America, since the 1950s, plus one title -- 1953's film noir thriller Leur derniere nuit (Their Last Night) -- which has never before had English subtitles and never been seen in America.

You should definitely plan on TiVo-ing all thirteen of these films, so you can watch them at your convenience. Each and every film is wonderful, and this, as you will see when you watch the films, is not hyperbole.

If you are new to the world of Jean Gabin, you might want to start with the acknowledged favorites, director Jean Renoir’s anti-war classic from 1937 Grand Illusion, and that same year’s Pepe Le Moko, Gabin’s gangster classic, which was also the basis for the famous line, “Come with me to the Casbah, we will make ze beautiful muzeek togezaire.” (Just as Cary Grant never actually said, "Judy, Judy, Judy," Gabin doesn't actually utter this line in Pepe Le Moko, although everybody thinks he did.) During the Second World War, Jean Gabin's French films were so popular in America, that Warner Bros. created its famous cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, based on the actor's voice and likeness.

My personal favorite films in this one-day festival are director Jean Gremillon’s double-header of Gueule d’amour (1937) and Remorques (1941). Gremillon is one of France's finest directors yet, like his countryman Gabin, he continues to be mostly unknown in the U.S. Jean Gabin is famously stoic in his films, but in his two Gremillon entries, he is decidedly "un-stoic." The festival is great because you get to see Gabin in his pre-World War II films, in which he typically plays young tragic drifter, and his later, 1950s films, in which he portrays wizened gentleman-gangsters.

I am currently re-writing, re-editing, and revising my book about Jean Gabin for a possible new, 2012 edition -- I have been re-visiting many of the films recently, and rewriting many chapters from scratch -- and I will let you know, on this blogsite, when it is available. (The edition of the book which you can currently purchase on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com is the most current, 2009 printing. You can't pre-order the new edition yet, because I'm still writing it!)

Thank you again for your interest in film history's greatest actor, Jean Gabin.

Scroll down, and you will find TCM'S Jean Gabin Schedule for Thursday August 18th in both Pacific Standard Time (PST) and Eastern Standard Time (EST). If you’re on something offbeat and perverse like “mountain time,” you’ll have to figure it out for yourself, because there is absolutely no way human beings can ever estimate or calibrate something that arcane.

Charles Zigman,
Author,
World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes one and Two.www.jeangabinbook.com

FULL SCHEDULE,
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18TH, 2011,
TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES JEAN GABIN MARATHON
ALL FILMS WILL BE PRESENTED WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

3:00 AM PST,
6:00 AM EST
GUEULE D'AMOUR (LADYKILLER) (1937)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
RARELY SCREENED IN THE U.S.
An AWOL legionnaire discovers the woman who won his heart was just in love with the uniform.
Dir: Jean Gremillon,
Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin.
BW-88 mins.

5:00 AM PST
8:00 AM EST
REMORQUES (TUGBOATS/STORMY WATERS) (1941)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
RARELY SCREENED IN THE U.S.
A married tugboat captain falls for a woman he rescues from a sinking ship.
Dir: Jean Gremillon.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan.
BW-83 mins.

Remorques.

6:30 AM PST
9:30 AM EST
LE JOUR SE LEVE (DAYBREAK) (1939)
A young factory worker loses the woman he loves to a vicious schemer.
Dir: Marcel Carne.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Jacqueline Laurent, Arletty.
BW-90 mins.

8:00 AM PST
11:00 AM EST
L' AIR DE PARIS (THE AIR OF PARIS) (1954)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
NOT SCREENED IN THE U.S. IN MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS.
An over-the-hill boxer stakes his fortune on training a young railroad-worker. This film re-teams Gabin, for the first time in fifteen years, with Marcel Carne, who had previously directed him in Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se leve.
Dir: Marcel Carne.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Arletty, Roland Lesaffre.
BW-104 mins.

10:00 AM PST
1:00 PM EST
LEUR DERNIERE NUIT (THEIR LAST NIGHT) (1953)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
NEVER BEFORE SCREENED IN THE U.S.
A schoolteacher falls for a librarian who's secretly the head of a criminal ring.
Dir: Georges Lacombe.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Madeleine Robinson.
BW-91 mins.

11:45 AM PST
2:45 PM EST
LE DESORDRE ET LA NUIT (DISORDER IN THE NIGHT/NIGHT AFFAIR) (1958)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
NOT SCREENED IN THE U.S. IN MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS.
A homicide detective tries to protect a pretty drug addict implicated in a murder.
Dir: Gilles Grangier.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Nadja Tiller, and Hazel Scott.
BW-91 mins.

In the 1950s, it was difficult for the great African-American songstress Hazel Scott to obtain film roles in her home-country of America, so Gabin, a major fan of Scott's, personally invited her to portray a lounge singer in his film noir masterwork, Le Desordre et la nuit. (Twenty-four years earlier, Gabin had extended the same offer to another legendary African-American entertainer, Josephine Baker, who appeared with him in 1934's Zouzou.)

1:30PM PST
4:30 PM EST
MARIA CHAPDELAINE (1934)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
A Canadian frontierswoman must choose from among three suitors.
Dir: Julien Duvivier.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Aumont.
BW-72 mins.

3:00PM PST
6:00 PM EST
BANDERA, LA (THE FLAG) (1935)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
A murderer escapes France to join the Spanish Foreign Legion, where he finds love while pursued by the law.
Dir: Julien Duvivier.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Pierre Renoir, Annabella, Robert Le Vigan.
BW-97 mins.

Drunken barfight in La Bandera!

5:00PM PST
8:00 PM EST
PEPE LE MOKO (1937)
In the mysterious Casbah section of Algiers, love for a beautiful woman draws a gangster out of hiding.
Dir: Julien Duvivier.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Gabriel Gabrio.
BW-94 mins.

"Come with me to the Casbah..." Pepe Le Moko, starring Jean Gabin, is one of the most atmospheric, and purely enjoyable, films ever made. Gabin even sings in the film!

7:00PM PST
10:00 PM EST
LA GRANDE ILLUSION (GRAND ILLUSION) (1937)
French POWs fight to escape their German captors during World War I.
Dir: Jean Renoir.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio, Erich von Stroheim, Gaston Modot.
BW-113 mins.

Here is director Jean Renoir, telling American audiences, in English, about his film Grand Illusion, for the film's North American re-release in the 1960s. Grand Illusion is part of the American Film Institute's list of the Best 100 Films Ever Made. Orson Welles once told Dick Cavett that if only one film could be saved for posterity, it would be Grand Illusion.

9:00PM PST
12:00 AM EST
LA BETE HUMAINE (THE HUMAN BEAST) (1938)
A railroad engineer enters an affair with his friend's amoral wife. From the novel by Emile Zola.
Dir. Jean Renoir.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Simone Simon.
BW-97 mins.

Riveting from start to finish: La Bete humaine.

11:00PM PST
2:00 AM EST
TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (DON'T TOUCH THE LOOT) (1954)
An aging gangster comes out of retirement when his best friend is kidnapped.
Dir. Jacques Becker.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Jeanne Moreau.
BW-96 mins.

Here is a trailer for Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), one of Roger Ebert's favorite French gangster films.

1:00 AM PST
4:00 AM EST
DES GENS SANS IMPORTANCE (PEOPLE OF NO IMPORTANCE) (1955)
AMERICAN TELEVISION PREMIERE.
An unhappy waitress starts an affair with a married truck driver.
Dir: Henri Verneuil.
Cast: Jean Gabin, Francoise Arnoul.
BW-99 mins.

During the Second World War, Jean Gabin lived briefly (1941-1943) in Los Angeles. Here is a portrait, photographed in Laurel Canyon.

JEAN GABIN: LATE SPRING/EARLY SUMMER 2011 UPDATE

2011-05-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

Lithograph "Jean Gabin" (1982) by Raymond Moretti (1931-2005).
Available to purchase at: http://www.forgottentreasurez.com/servlet/the-2216Raymond-Moretti-JEAN-GABIN/Detail

HAPPY 108th BIRTHDAY, JEAN GABIN!

MAY 30th, 2011
This is my first blog entry in almost four months – I wrote my previous posting all the way back on February 1st. I apologize for my lack of new entries. Besides editing my text for a possible future edition of World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, a never-ending process, I am also completing work on my first chldren’s book – which should be out this fall.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JEAN GABIN:
First, I would like to wish Happy Birthday to Jean Gabin, because May 17th would have been his 108th birthday. Gabin, of course, passed away in November 1976, at the relatively young age of seventy-two, after completing his ninety-fifth and final film, director Jose Giovanni’s exceptional Deux hommes dans la ville (Two Men in Town), in which he co-starred with Alain Delon. This is a great movie about the justice system which is pretty easy to find on Amazon.com.

JEAN GABIN IS THE FACE OF THE 2011 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL:
Charles H. Meyer reported in the May 11th issue of the on-line magazine Cinespect that the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival, which was held between May 11th and May 22nd this year, chose to honor Jean Gabin’s birthday this year, by selecting the legendary performer as the face of the 2011 Festival. Guests of this year’s Festival who arrived by train at the Cannes train station were met by a huge mural of Gabin, and in the photograph used to make this mural, Gabin is Jacques Lantier, Emile Zola's doomed anti-hero from Marcel Carne's haunting 1938 classic La Bete humaine.

Link to Article:
http://cinespect.com/setting-the-scene-cannes-journal-entry-one/

SACRAMENTO FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMMER CECILE DOWNS CHOOSES JEAN GABIN’S INSPECTOR MAIGRET CHARACTER AS “GREATEST FRENCH MOVIE DETECTIVE OF ALL TIME,” IN A MAY 27TH ARTICLE.
My friend Cecile Downs, who runs the Sacramento French Film Festival each June, wrote an article for the May 27th issue of the on-line magazine France Today, in which she handpicked Jean Gabin’s character of Inspector Maigret – Gabin portrayed Maigret in three wonderful films – as the Greatest French Movie Detective. Here is the article:

http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2011/05/25/greatest_french_movie_detectives.html
Cecile's 10th Annual 2011 Sacramento French Film Festival will be held from June 17th to June 26th, and the schedule’s just gone up. I went last year to present a weekend of Gabin films, and the selection of new films and old ones was fantastic.
http://www.sacramentofrenchfilmfestival.org/

Jean Gabin played author Georges Simenon's legendary Inspector Maigret in three films. Here is a poster for the American release of the first one, 1957's Maigret tend un peige (Maigret Sets a Trap). United Artists, the film's American distributor, worried that Americans wouldn't know who Maigret is, so for it's U.S. release they luridly re-titled the picture Woman Bait, which isn't exactly incorrect because in the film, Inspector Maigret uses a woman as 'bait,' in order to lure the killer into his trap.

A GERMAN-LANGUAGE RADIO BIOGRAPHY OF JEAN GABIN IS IN THE WORKS:
I have been corresponding recently with Dr. Christian Buckard in Berlin. Dr. Buckard is currently preparing a one-hour biography of Jean Gabin for German radio, which should air either later this year or at the beginning of next year, and he told me that he would be very interested in preparing a simultaneous English-language version of the radio program, for which he is interviewing Gabin’s friends and family, but I am at a loss at trying to help him because I don't know anybody here in the U.S. who produces one-hour radio biographies. If anybody who is reading this knows anybody, at any radio organization, that might be interested in helping Dr. Buckard to subsidize an English version of such a program, please email me at author@jeangabinbook.com, and I will pass the information along to him. Years ago, one-hour radio biographies seemed to be very prevalent on American public radio, but I haven’t heard too many of them lately.

GWYNETH PALTROW TO PLAY MARLENE DIETRICH FOR HBO, AND AN “UNNAMED FRENCH ACTOR” HAS BEEN CONFIRMED TO PLAY HER LOVER, JEAN GABIN:
In my February 1st blog posting, I neglected to mention something that I had just read on Indiewire.com. On December 29st, 2010, Indiewire posted that HBO’s three-hour Marlene Dietrich biopic was being fast-tracked for production, that Gwyneth Paltrow had been chosen to portray Dietrich, and that an unnamed actor has already been chosen to play Dietrich’s lover, Jean Gabin. As Gabin and Dietrich fans know, Dietrich dated thousands of people in her life, but she always considered Gabin to be the one, true love of her life, and they even co-starred in a movie together, 1946’s criminally unknown Martin Roumagnac.

I think the reason I didn’t mention this ‘news’ back in February, is because the same announcement was made back in 2006; in 2006, Dreamworks announced that it was about to star Paltrow in a Dietrich biopic for theatrical release – but it didn’t happen. I think that Paltrow, if the film ever gets made, will be a fine Dietrich – she doesn’t look exactly like Dietrich, but I think she can really ‘convey’ the Dietrich persona, and if you saw Country Strong or watch "Glee," you already know that she sings really well – but I confess to being a bit concerned about how the Gabin character will be treated in the film. Since most Americans still aren’t too familiar with Gabin, I am sure that the Gabin role in this telepic will be some kind of generic ‘French lover’ role, even though Gabin always abhorred that kind of caricature and rejected it when it was offered to him. But I suppose I shouldn’t nitpick. We should be thankful that there will be a Gabin character in the HBO film at all, no matter how small the part will inevitably be. Some Gabin is better than no Gabin...

Below, are eight minutes and twenty-one seconds of real-life lovers Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin in the only film they made together, director Georges Lacombe's Martin Roumagnac (1946). The film has an undeserved bad reputation in the United States, because back in 1948, the film's American distributor, offended by the fact that Dietrich's character was a prostitute, cut the film by more than 40 minutes, apparently rendering it incomprehensible. The film has not been shown in the United States, in any form, since 1948 -- it has never been revived on television, or in retrospective theaters, or on bootleg videos, or anywhere. I hope that soon one of those dedicated film fans who makes 'fan subtitles' will issue an English subtitled DVD of the uncut French print, because Martin Roumagnac, in its uncut state, is a truly magical film, another of Gabin's best.

The link to Indiewire’s Paltrow/Dietrich/Gabin article is:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/gwyneth_paltrow_to_play_marlene_dietrich_in_tv_biopic/

GABIN’S FAMILY LOBBIES TO GET HIS NAME RESTORED TO PRESTIGIOUS FRENCH ACTING AWARD:
In February 1976, France held its first annual nationally televised film awards, the Cesars, and that first broadcast was co-hosted by Jean Gabin, only nine months before his death, and actress Romy Schneider. Between 1981 and 2006, the award given to each year's Best New Actor was called the Jean Gabin Award, and some of its notable recipients have included some names who are familiar to American viewers of contemporary French cinema -- Thierry Lermitte, Tcheky Karyo, Jean-Hughes Anglade, Vincent Perez, Olivier Martinez, Matthieu Kassovitz, and Yvan Attal.

In 2007, organizers of the Cesars changed the name of this award to the Patrick Dewaere Award, re-naming it after Dewaere, the sensitive young French actor who took his life in 1982, at the age of thirty-five. Dewaere will be known to U.S. audiences for having starred in director Bertrand Blier’s international hit from 1977, Preparez vos mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs) in which he had co-starred with Gerard Depardieu and Carol Laure. (I snuck into a theater to see Handkerchiefs when I was eleven years old, and I am forever haunted by the scene in which the bullies taunt a little boy by chanting, "Dip his d**k in shoepolish!" over and over...)

It was reported on April 20th, 2011 by the French wire service AFP that Jean Gabin’s children, Florence Moncorge and Mathias Moncorge, are currently lobbying to get their father’s name restored to this award. This blogsite firmly supports this action, and if you agree that Jean Gabin’s named should be restored to the award, you might want to shoot an email, send a letter or fax, or make a phone call to either the President of the Cesars, Alain Terzain, or the Vice-Secretary, Gilles Jacob. (Everybody who knows me knows that I am an enemy of subtlety in all of its pernicious forms; I have already done all of the above, and more than once. To make any changes in this life, you really have to hit people hard. Let subtlety be your enemy, too.)

Contact information for the muckimucks/wheels of the Cesar Awards is as follows:

M. Alain Terzain or M. Gilles Jacob
Cesar Awards
16, avenue Elisee reclus
75007 Paris
Phone: + 33 53 64 05 25
Fax: + 33 1 53 64 05 24

Link to this article:
http://www.commeaucinema.com/cannes/afp/la-fille-de-jean-gabin-conteste-l-heritage-revendique-par-le-prix-patrick-dewaere,206734

Here is Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, starring Patrick Dewaere, in its entirety:

LE PORT DU DESIR (1955) AND LA VERITE SUR BEBE DONGE (1952)
TWO NEW GABIN MOVIES ARRIVE ON DVD IN MAY, 2011,
ENGLISH-SUBTITLED FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME:
In my last blog entry, dated February 1st – four months ago – I mentioned that ten Jean Gabin films had just been issued on DVD, with English subtitles for the first time. Those titles were Du haut en bas (1933), La Belle equipe (1936), Gueule d’amour (1937), Des gens sans importance (1956), Voici le temps des assassins (1957), Le Desordre et la nuit (1958), Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), Le Soleil des voyous (1966), Le Pacha (1968), and Le Tueur (1972). As I also mentioned in that posting, these are not ‘legitimate’ DVD releases from major home video companies, and you won’t find them for sale on Amazon.com. Rather, these are ‘fan-subtitled’ videos. Thanks to some very recent digital technology, fans of foreign-language movies are buying non-English-subtitled DVDs from Europe, and making their own subtitles on their home computers; and as I mentioned in the previous posting, the quality of many of these titles, both pictorially and as far as the quality and accuracy of the subtitles, is often brilliant – sometimes, it’s even Criterion Collection quality. Can you imagine subtitling an entire two-hour film just for “fun?” These dedicated film fans do it, and they sell or trade the finished product on-line, on auction websites like www.ioffer.com and www.ecrater.com – ioffer and ecrater go deeper than eBay, when it comes to offering the really rare stuff. The two specific links you need to find these rare Gabin titles are: http://www.ioffer.com/selling/shls18520 (based in the UK) and http://www.ecrater.com/search.php?keywords=Jean+Gabin (based in the US), although both sellers will send you DVDs that are region free, so that you can play them on either a PAL DVD player, if you live in Europe, or an NTSC machine, if you live in North America. These sellers also offer a number of French and Italian genre pictures from the 1920s up through today, sans Gabin, which fans have also subtitled into English for the first time, and fan-subtitling, as I mentioned in my previous posting, is great, because it really democratizes film distribution for the first time, in the sense that,if you want to see a movie and it's not available with English subtitles, you can simply make your own! These sellers additionally sell a great many fan-subtitled movies that do not have Gabin, wonderful genre movies from France, Italy, and Germany.

Anyway, now it is the end of May, and I am happy to report that two additional Jean Gabin movies have just been released on ‘fan-subtitled’ DVDs this month, and the quality of both titles is great.

The first Jean Gabin movie to arrive on a fan-subtitled DVD this month, is another of the actor's great and atmospheric noirs, 1955’s Le Port du desir, which was released in North America as House on the Waterfront in 1958, and which has never revived in the US subsequently to 1958. This film is a kind of a waterfront Casablanca, in which Gabin’s ‘Rick’ character, who is called LeQuevic, owns a waterfront cabaret/bar in the French port of Brest. A stripper has disappeared and it’s up to Gabin to find her before the mob gets to her first. In the film’s most amusing sequence, we actually get to see Gabin in full deep sea-diving gear, and when his crew lifts his heavy steel diving helmet off of his head, he’s got a cigarette dangling from his maw. (Only in France!) Le Port du desir is the only Gabin film to have been directed by Edmond T. Greville, who was equally at home making French-language movies in France and English-language movies in England, and if you’re an American or a Brit, you might already be familiar with Greville, because he directed the 1962 British cult-classic Beat Girl, which starred Adam Faith and Oliver Reed. Le Port du desir is fast paced, Gabin is great in it, and it’s one of those films which definitely deserves to be better known. (And: The film’s underwater sequences are credited to a very young Louis Malle!)

The second Gabin title to be released this month on DVD with English subtitles, is director Henri Decoin’s ultra-weird 1952 film noir offering, La Verite sur Bebe Donge (The Truth About Bebe Donge), from a novel by Maigret creator Georges Simenon, in which Jean Gabin’s captain of industry, Francois Donge, marries Bebe, one of the craziest femmes-fatales you’ll ever see, and she’s played by another French film legend, Danielle Darrieux, an actress who is still appearing in movies to this day – in fact, in 2009, Darrieux supplied the voice of the grandmother to director Marjane Satrapi's feature-length French animation Persepolis, a film which is so gut-wrenchingly heart-breaking, you forget you're watching animation. Danielle Darrieux would appear opposite Gabin later in 1952, in Marcel Ophuls' anthology tryptych Le Plaisir -- the uncut version of Le Plaisir just appeared on Turner Classic Movies on May 21st -- and the actress would also appear opposite him in 1958’s noir Le Desordre et la nuit, which was released on a fan-subtitled DVD back in February.

In La Verite sur Bebe Donge, Darrieux’s Bebe insinuates herself into Gabin’s life, and since she can’t wait to get her meathooks on his fortune, she does the only thing that a proper femme-fatale can do -- she poisons him with mercury! Therefore, the entire movie is narrated by Jean Gabin’s Francois character as he languishes in a coma, in the hospital. If this narrative device seems a bit odd, it's not the first time that such a device had been utilized: Two years prior to Bebe Donge, in 1950, in Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Blvd., William Holden narrated the whole movie from beyond the grave as he lay dead in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool. (Movies with ‘unreliable narrators’ are interesting enough, but movies with ‘unconscious narrators’ are way more interesting.) I don’t know if I would consider Bebe Donge to be one of Gabin’s best movies, but it is certainly one of his most offbeat entries, and it is definitely worth a view. This film was never released theatrically in America.

And speaking of Bebe Donge, as I was about to publish this posting, I learned something new about it, so here is a new/late-breaking/related story:

ITALIAN BAND NAMES ITSELF AFTER JEAN GABIN'S 1952 FILM LA VERITE SUR BEBE DONGE, AND USES CLIPS FROM THE FILM IN ITS MUSIC VIDEOS:
In my 2008 book World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, I mentioned that there are two musical artists in Europe who have been so inspired by the French actor, that they have named their acts for him -- specifically, in the book, I mentioned the Italian techno/dance band Gabin (you can see their videos on YouTube) and the French rapper MC Jean Gabin.

Well now, as of 2011, there is a brand new Italian band, based in Rome, called "Bebe Donge!" The band's frontwoman, singer/songwriter Fiammetta Jahier, is such a fan of the 1952 Jean Gabin/Danielle Darrieux film La Verite sur Bebe Donge, which is apparently considered to be a cult film in Italy (I didn't know that!), that she has named her group after the film. Here are Fiammetta, Max, Alessio, Federico, Francesco and Tommaso performing their new track "Sono Sola," which contains clips of Gabin and Darrieux from the Bebe Donge film:

Bebe Donge, "Sono Sola," Copyright 2011 by Il Sid Records.

AND FINALLY:

DID YOU KNOW THAT JEAN GABIN DOES NOT HAVE A STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME?
I live in Los Angeles, and it bothers me to no end that Jean Gabin's name does not appear on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, on Hollywood Blvd. (Gabin's co-stars from 1942's Moontide, Ida Lupino and Thomas Mitchell have stars, but Gabin does not have one.) I have been doing a bit of research into the process of how to make this happen. As a layman, I -- or you -- can download a form from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and nominate Gabin for a 2012 Star. If the Chamber of Commerce votes "yes," then, at that point the nominating committee (me and whoever else might be interested in working with me on the project) would be responsible for sending the Chamber of Commerce a check for $25,000.00, which is the cost of a star -- this money also pays for permanent maintenance of the star as well as the ceremony on Hollywood Blvd. when the star is unveiled to the public. Yes, you have read it correctly: It costs twenty-five thousand dollars to have a star's name added to the Walk of Fame and, apparently, the Chamber of Commerce distributes every penny of this 25K among local charities. Does anybody have any interest in helping me to make this happen, either this year or next year? Let's discuss, at author@jeangabinbook.com. (PS, Don't send me any checks just yet, because, as David Letterman used to say back in the '80s, if you do, I'll just use them for candy and gum.)

THANK YOU!
Thank you again for supporting my two-volume book WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN (www.jeangabinbook.com). I am currently editing the text for a possible new edition – I’ve been working on this for about a year-and-a-half – so if you have any comments or suggestions, please email them to me.

Jean Gabin, Circa 1936.

Have a great Memorial Day.

-- Charles Zigman,
author@jeangabinbook.com

2011 Begins with Ten (10) Jean Gabin Movies, on English-Subtitled DVDs for the First Time

2011-02-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the legendary filmmaker G.W. Pabst directed Jean Gabin and Peter Lorre in a 1933 ensemble comedy, Du haut en bas, which was styled after the American film of the previous year, Grand Hotel? You probably didn't, because it has been "missing" for more than seventy years, even in France, the country of its production. But as of January 2011, a rediscovered Du haut en bas (pictured, top) and eight other Jean Gabin are now available on DVD, with English subtitles for the very first time.

Hope everybody is having a very good New Year. Thank you again for supporting my book WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN. At some point in 2011 or 2012, I hope there will be a newly updated Third Edition. I have spent the last year-and-a-half engaging in a good deal of re-writing – writers are never happy, especially me – and I will probably also be adding additional information, and more photographs, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, as 2011 begins, there is fantastic news afoot for all English-speaking Jean Gabin fans – not one, not two, not three, but TEN (10) Jean Gabin movies have suddenly become available on DVD with English subtitles for the very first time. In WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, I bemoaned the fact that many of Gabin’s movies have never been available with English subtitles, but thanks to some very recent digital technology which has emerged only over the last two years, and thanks to some rather enterprising classic movie fans, this is no longer the truth.

Understand: These are not legitimate releases from the major home-video distribution companies. These ‘bootleg’ DVDs are made by fans, and the quality of most of them – and here I an referring to both pictorial image as well as to the quality of the digital English subtitles – is almost uniformly very good. In a few cases, I would even say the quality is commensurate with DVDs being offered by the Criterion Collection.

Over the last two years, some very dedicated and polylinguistic fans of classic movies have been purchasing DVDs of foreign-language films which are not subtitled into English and, thanks to some new ‘bit-torrent’ software (don’t ask; I’m practically Amish when it comes to anything technical) are adding their own digital English subtitles. Can you imagine subtitling an entire movie, just for enjoyment? Many do.

All of these ‘fan-subtitled’ films are currently available for you to buy on-line, but you won’t find them at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com. Since these are privately made DVDs, which are exchanged privately from collector to collector, you will have to go to the two main auction sites, eBay and iOffer – and iOffer, which is a kind of ‘extreme eBay’ for super hard to find curios – is your best bet. On iOffer especially, the individual sellers often change – one week one seller might offering a particular film and the following week, that seller might not be offering it but three other sellers might have it in stock. So I won’t list the names of the individual sellers in this post, but you will definitely find English-subtitled versions of these films if you head over to iOffer or eBay and type the names of the following films into your search. What is even more amazing, is that new foreign-language titles, from all over the globe, are being painstakingly subtitled into English, by fans, every month.

Two of the films in this list, 1936’s La Belle equipe, directed by Julien ‘Pepe Le Moko’ Duvivier and 1937’s Gueule d’amour, directed by the highly underrated Jean Gremillon, a filmmaker who deserves some serious study, are worth a special mention: In France, they are considered to be two of Gabin’s very best films from Gabin’s very important Poetic-Realist period of the mid-to-late 1930s – in France they are part of that same pantheon which includes Pepe Le Moko, La Grande illusion, La Bete humaine, Le Jour se leve, and Le Quai des brumes – yet this is the first time we are seeing them on home video with English subtitles.

Here are the ten newly-subtitled-into-English Jean Gabin movies which I have been able to purchase from private, on-line sellers over the last month:

1. Du haut en bas (From Top to Bottom, 1933): Did you know that Jean Gabin, early in his career, was directed by the legendary German Pandora's Box filmmaker G. W. Pabst? It’s true. This rare early comedy – I would characterize it as being a kind of Grand Hotel set in a socialist-utopian apartment complex in which rich and poor live together in peace – is so rare today, in the sense that there aren’t even any prints of the film France, that when I initially saw the film, back in 2004, I had to go all the way to Belgium to see the only remaining print, at the Royal Cinematheque of Brussels, and because the print did not have English subtitles, I needed to have a human translator sit with me and tell me what the characters were saying. Incredibly, just over this past year, somebody in Germany actually found an ancient 35mm print of Du Haut en bas in the original French, with German subtitles! Whoever discovered the print had the foresight to film-chain a DVD copy and he has been circulating it among classic movie lovers, and on-line movie fans have now, just over the last several months, created their own digital English subtitles for the film, which are very clear and easy to read. As far as visual quality, the print itself hasn’t been restored – the DVD is made from an original 1934 film print, so it has a fair amount of scratches and pops – but it is an uncut print, and what it lacks in visual perfection, it more than makes up for in rarity.

Jean Gabin is endearingly funny as the building’s favorite resident, Austria’s Number One soccer player Charles Boulla, and you might call Boulla ‘The David Beckham of 1934.’ You’ll also see another French acting legend in Du haut en bas – it’s Michel Simon, France’s very famous answer to Charles Laughton, playing one of his great slovenly eccentrics, and five years after Du haut en bas, in 1938, Gabin and Simon would, of course, star together in Marcel Carne’s haunting Poetic-Realist classic, Le Quai des brumes. And if the combination of G.W. Pabst, Jean Gabin, and Michel Simon isn’t enough to grab you, what if I sweeten the deal and tell you that the film also features Peter Lorre, in just a few scenes, as a silent, stumbling vagabond. Du haut en bas was made a few years after Lorre had starred in Fritz Lang’s M, but because the actor was apparently addicted to morphine, directors would only hire him for small roles, including his small-but-important role in this film. I received my English-subtitled copy of this film from an iOffer seller, and if you don’t see it listed on the website, place a free want ad on the site asking for it and, spy-movie like, “someone will be right with you.” You will really enjoy all seventy-nine minutes of Du haut en bas.

Here's the poster for 1933's Du haut en bas. Jean Gabin was about one year away from becoming France's number one mega-star, so even though he is first billed in the film itself, it's Gabin's co-star Michel Simon, "the French Charles Laughton," who appears on the poster. Of course, Simon will co-star with Gabin more famously in 1938's Le Quai des brumes, in which Simon will play the sadistic Zabel.

2. La Belle equipe (The Good Team/They Were Five, 1936): In WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, I lamented the fact that it is beyond tragic that Julien Duvivier’s great 1936 ensemble comedy La Belle equipe has not been shown with English subtitles since its brief American theatrical release, as They Were Five, seventy-three years ago, back in 1938. Thanks to a digitally and polylinguistically-inclined Jean Gabin fan who has made his own digital English subtitles and married them to a French-language DVD copy of the film, it finally, as of January 2011, exists in an English-subtitled version and, as with Du haut en bas, I obtained my English-subtitled DVD of La Belle equipe from a seller on iOffer.com. La Belle equipe goes against the grain of Gabin’s other films, because it is a comedy. Not only are the subtitles accurate and easy to read, but this DVD is made from a restored print.

In the late 1930s, Gabin played a tragic figure in a number of his films, but in La Belle equipe, he is part of a warm ensemble comedy, in which five out-of-work factory employees win the lottery on a ticket they purchased together and use their earnings to restore, and open, a beautiful country guinguette (hotel/restaurant/holiday camp), with results which are both happy and tragic. I say both happy and tragic, because the film has always had, and this is quite uncharacteristic for Gabin’s mid-to-late 1930s films, a happy ending – but last year, in Germany, a sleuthing film fan actually found an original pre-release print featuring director Julien Duvivier’s original tragic ending, which was deemed too upsetting for general release, and which was shelved, and presumed to be lost for more than seven decades. The very good print on the English-subtitled DVD ends with the director’s newly-discovered, original tragic ending – it was screened at the Museum of Modern Art for the first time in 2010 – and, after the film is over, you will also get to see the happy ending by which the film has always been known. After you see the film and watch both of the endings, please email me – author@jeangabinbook.com – and tell me which ending you prefer; I think we can get some pretty healthy debate going over this one, because the ending I like better is not necessarily the correct choice!

The fan-subtitled DVD of La Belle equipe features the director's original ending, not seen since 1936!

3. Gueule d’amour (Lady Killer, 1937): When I wrote about this extraordinary film in the First and Second Editions of my book, in 2008 and 2009, I think I gave it rather short shrift. I mentioned that, when I first saw Gueule d’amour in 2002, I had enjoyed it, but I didn’t give it too much thought, nor did I go into the film too deeply. Now, in 2011, I have revisited the film for the first time in nine years, on a great quality fan-subtitled DVD, which I found through a seller on iOffer.com, and it is truly another of Gabin’s best films. In most of his movies from this time period of the mid-to-late 1930s, Gabin’s tragic drifter characters are always quiet and stoic, heading off peacefully to their unpleasant fates without complaint, but in this picture – without giving anything away – director Jean Gremillon really pulls an incredible, non-stoic, full-of-feeling performance out of the typically laconic actor. I guarantee that even the steeliest viewers will shed a tear during the last several minutes of this film, and if you are familiar with Edvard Munch’s painting “The Screamer” – that’s Gabin at the end of this film.

In Geule d’amour, Gabin is freewheeling Lucien Bourrach, member of the SPAHI, the elaborately costumed French cavalry, and he is known, by the characters in the film, as ‘Lady Killer.’ Lady Killer is a man who has no problem getting any woman he wants, but he is unable to get the one woman he has ever actually loved, the beautiful society woman Madeleine, as played by Mireille Balin – she will of course deign to have a brief, torrid affair with him, but she’s not interested in a long-term coupling with him because of what she perceives to be his lowly social class. Madeleine taunts Lady Killer into committing the hauntingly savage act which will up the film. Previously in the same year of 1937, Balin, one of France’s most popular pre-War actresses, had appeared opposite Gabin in Pepe Le Moko, and in Le Moko, of course, it was Gabin’s smooth criminal character who held the cards in the on-screen Balin-Gabin relationship.

4. Des gens sans importance (People of No Importance, 1956): Last year, on this blog site, I mentioned that a fan-subtitled version of the 1955 thriller Gas-Oil, which co-starred Gabin with Jeanne Moreau, in which Gabin played a laconic truck-driver, had been released in a very good quality bootleg DVD, with fan-made English subtitles. Gas-Oil was so popular in France when it was first released that, one year later, Gabin played a laconic truck-driver one more time, in director Henri Verneuil’s atmospheric Des gens sans importance, or The People of No Importance, and this film is now available – you can find your very good, English-subtitled copy from sellers on iOffer.com – as well. In this film, Gabin’s trucker character, Viard, carries on a relationship with a young barmaid who is played by Francoise Arnoul – Gabin and Arnoul had previously, five years earlier, appeared in Jean Renoir’s French Cancan – and the results are bittersweet. In Des gens sans importance, Gabin fears that is trucking company is phasing him out and, to that extent, this is one of the best films on the subjects of ageism and aging that you will ever see. Very highly recommended.

5. Voici le temps des assassins (Time of the Assassins, 1957): If you mixed a Jim Thompson novella with a Russ Meyer movie, you would get the incredible, fast-paced noir, Voici le temps des assassins, in which Gabin is a middle-age chef who gets grifted by a team of hophead mother-daughter prostitutes! It’s fast-paced, thought provoking, dark, and another of my very favorite Jean Gabin movies. It even boasts a couple of rather ‘kinky’ touches which seem like they might be more at home in a Russ Meyer movie than in a Jean Gabin movie, and the film is especially memorable for its “Did that really just happen?”-ending, an ending which, without any exaggeration, you will not get out of your head for the rest of your life.

6. Le Desordre et la nuit (Disorder in the Night/Night Affair, 1958): Another very cool Gabin noir from the ‘50s features Our Anti-Hero as Inspector Vallois, a middle-aged police inspector who falls in love with a twentysomething hophead prostitute, played by Nadja Tiller. This wonderful movie is also important because it features, in a supporting role, Hazel Scott, the dynamic African-American singer who, like Josephine Baker twenty or thirty years before, also caught many of her best breaks in Europe, rather than in her home country of the U.S. It is available as a DVD, with fan-made English subtitles, through sellers on iOffer.com.

7. Le Cave se rebiffe (The Counterfeiters of Paris,1961): In 1964, MGM released director Gilles Grangier’s outstanding widescreen thriller, in North America, as The Counterfeiters of Paris. While MGM apparently continues to have an English-subtitled print of the film in its vault, the studio is not permitted to screen it in North America, because shortly after the film’s initial American release forty-six years ago, the rights reverted back to the film’s French production company, Cite Films. However, here comes some good news: Thanks to some fans who have made their own digital, English-language subtitles, you can now, as of the beginning of 2011, obtain a really great widescreen print from various iOffer sellers. In Le Cave se rebiffe, Gabin portrays the world’s greatest counterfeiter, Le Dabe, which translates into English as, “The Dude:” Yes, thirty-seven years before Jeff Bridges played a character called “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, Gabin had played a character with that very monicker! Le Cave se rebiffe has a lot of humor, too, thanks to dialogue by the prolific French screenwriting genius Michel Audiard, and as far as tone in concerned, I would compare it to two great French thrillers from 1964 which do not feature Gabin, director Georges Lautner’s double-header of Les Tontons flingueurs and Les Barbouzes, two Lino Ventura-starring films which you can also find on iOffer as a fan-subtitled DVDs. The plot, in brief, is that Gabin is France’s most successful counterfeiter of all time. He’s retired to Venezuela, and is pulled out of retirement to supervise ‘one more job’ in Paris. This film is a successful mélange of action and humor, and it’s got all the double and triple-crosses you can handle, and then some.

8. Le Soleil des voyous (The Sun Shines Over the No-Goods/Action Man,1966): Le Soleil des voyous is a fun, candy-colored – it was filmed in the old IB Technicolor process – heist movie, and it is the only movie to co-star Jean Gabin with American television’s Elliott Ness, the one and only Robert Stack. In this fun film, Parisian bar-owner Gabin and American mercenary Stack team-up to rob a U.S. Army payroll truck. In 2009, Image Home Video released a legitimate DVD version of Le Soleil de voyous on the North American market, which I wrote about it in an earlier posting on this blogsite, and while the good news is that the Image Entertainment print is uncut and letterboxed, the bad news is that it is dubbed into English, so you’re not hearing Gabin’s real voice – one of the basic pleasures of watching a Gabin movie is hearing his legendary voice – or Stack’s real voice, and what is particularly annoying about seeing a dubbed version of this film, is that it is the only film in which Robert Stack, who grew up on French military bases, speaks all of the film’s dialogue in perfect French! Well, thanks to a fan who has made his own English subtitles, I have just been able to obtain, from an iOffer seller, a great quality DVD of Le Soleil des voyous in its original French language, with excellent digital English subtitles. In the case of Le Soleil des voyous, skip Image Home Entertainment’s dubbed version, and head for the original French-language version with English subtitles. Robert Stack’s French is impeccable, and because the film was clearly made to capitalize on the James Bond craze, Stack does some amazing Kung-Fu in the film, as well.

One day I prayed to God, and I asked Him, "Dear God, could you please put Jean Gabin and Robert Stack in a movie together?" He did, and it was good. So mote it be.

9. Le Pacha (The Showdown, 1968): In this very decent Technicolor policier, Jean Gabin’s crusty old police inspector, Joss, avenges his partner’s death in the way in which Charles Bronson would also gain revenge in American cinema ten years later. The film is occasionally available in an English-dubbed version on VHS – I found mine on eBay about eight years ago, and I obtained it from a seller in Greece – but now, as of 2011, an original French-language print, with excellent, fan-made English subtitles, is available from an iOffer seller. A high-spot of the film is that Inspector Joss happens upon a pretty unusual murder lead: One of the murder suspects is the drummer in Serge Gainsbourg’s band, so Serge makes an appearance, performing the hip tune “Requieum pour un con,” which the film made successful in France. Georges Lautner, born in 1926, is the director of this film, and while I would not rank Le Pacha as one of his best films, he did direct a number of excellent thrillers, many of them seasoned with droll humor, in a career which has spanned forty years. He hasn’t directed a film in ten years – his last project was a few episodes of a French t.v. series, in 2001 – but here’s hoping that, if he is able, he will give us one more classic.

10. Le Tueur (The Killer, 1972): In my Jean Gabin book, I mentioned that most of Jean Gabin’s movies are great, but there are just a few which aren’t so hotsy-totsy. Director Denys de La Patelliere's Le Tueur is one of these forgettable efforts, and it is a pretty sub-standard procedural in which Gabin plays an almost-ready-for-retirement police inspector who is searching for a psychotic killer, as played by the Italian '70s action hero with the most masculine name I've ever heard, Fabio Testi. (I wish my last name could be ‘Testi!’) It’s one of the few movies in which Gabin looks not just stoic and laconic, but actually exhausted, as though he would rather be home at his farm in Normandy than making this movie. Still, for Gabin completists, you might want to check this French-German co-production out, due to its rarity in North America. (Horrible, flat cinematography in this film: In one sequence, set in police headquarters, it appears that the filmmakers couldn’t afford ‘fill’ light, and the actors cast inept looking shadows on the walls behind them, as you might find in somebody’s uncle’s bad home movies from the ‘70s.)

Also, don’t forget the fan-subtitled DVDs which were released last year, 1955’s fantastic noirs Razzia sur la chnouf (if you like Touch of Evil, you'll love Razzia sur la chnouf) and Gas-Oil.

Additionally: There are six Jean Gabin films which used to be available from eBay sellers as VHS tapes with English subtitles,but they are now out of print, and iOffer sellers are now offering some good quality English-subtitled DVDs. The titles are: 1934’s Marie Chapdelaine, which stars Gabin as a Canadian fur-trapper; 1959’s Un Singe en hiver, which is the only film to co-star Gabin with Jean-Paul Belmondo; 1961’s Le President, featuring Gabin as the French Prime-Minister; 1962’s Le Gentleman d’Epsom, starring The World’s Coolest Movie Star as a racetrack grifter; and 1968’s Le Tatoue, a madcap comedy starring Gabin with rubber-faced comedian Louis de Funes, who is sometimes called the French Jerry Lewis.

Remember, all of the titles I have just mentioned are available from sellers on either eBay.com or iOffer.com, but iOffer is actually a better place to check for them than eBay. iOffer works the same way as eBay, in the sense that one must sign up in order to use it, but it is free. A special trick, is that if you don’t see a particular film title listed on iOffer, just place a free want ad, asking for it, and you will be surprised how quickly somebody who has the title in stock will get back to you. Some of the people on iOffer who are offering these fan-subtitled Gabin DVDs are traders instead of sellers, and they will not accept money for the films they are offering, but they will ask you to trade hard-to-find films from your own DVD collection for them. That’s not a problem, though, because if you’re a serious collector of classic movies on DVD, your present collection is sure to contain a few rarities.

HOUSEKEEPING NOTES: Many of these fan-subtitled DVDs will be in the European 'PAL' format, which means that they won't play on most North American 'NTSC' format DVD players, however for between $80.00 and $200.00, you can purchase an international, 'codeless' or 'region free' DVD player which will play both NTSC and PAL format DVDs. You won't find these machines in a brick-and-mortar store, but if you Google "codeless DVD player" or "region free" DVD player, you will find some good ones available from on-line sellers, and the $80.00 machines work just as well as the more expensive units. I personally own two codeless DVD players, and I bought them both here:
http://www.planetomni.com/Prod_MSDVD.shtml. And don't be scared if you don't see the English subtitles immediately when you slide your disc into the tray: Just click on the 'subtitle' key on your codeless DVD player's remote control, turn on the English subtitles and, like magic, they will appear... And here is some good news for those who don't want to spring for a new DVD player: Both NTSC and PAL DVDs will play on your computer's DVD drive, no matter what country your computer is from.

Also, for U.S. Gabin fans who subscribe to Dish Network or DirectTV, there is an optional French-language, English-subtitled cable station which you can add for a one-time extra fee of about $100.00, and thereafter, you pay about $10 a month for it, but it is supremely worth it: It’s TV Monde 5, and this French-language/English-subtitled channel frequently broadcasts rare French movies with English subtitles, in addition to French news and entertainment programming. Last year, in 2010, I noticed that TV5 presented three Jean Gabin movies which are not shown with English subtitles too much: 1971’s Le Chat, the only film to co-star Gabin with Simone Signoret, as well as 1958’s Maigret Tend un piege and Le President.

Ten new Jean Gabin movies on DVD, with English subtitles for the very first time? Yes! They are made by fans and for fans, and so while you won’t find any fancy packaging – although some of the sellers have been known to make their own cover-art – you will be seeing wonderful movies which have not been seen in the U.S. in decades, or ever. In addtition to subtitling Jean Gabin movies, these classic movie superfans are subtitling decades worth of other French (and German, and Italian, and Spanish, and any other language you can think of) movies into English for the first time, and they are providing a truly revolutionary service, because they are opening up a whole new world of classic films to people who would otherwise, due to the language barrier, have no way to see them. Some of the legitimate home video companies will never subtitle these 'deep inventory' films, which they consider to be a very small niche, into English, because they might feel there is not enough profit to be made from doing so, but the language barrier is now crumbling, and home video is quickly becoming democratized, due to the brand new and exciting world of fan-subtitled DVD.

Happy 2011 from www.jeangabinbook.com.

UPDATE, 2/5/11: Because a few readers have asked me, if you click on the title of this article, it will take you directly to the www.ioffer.com store for the gentleman who is offering many of the abovementioned films on DVD, with fan-made English subtitles. The quality is uniformly excellent.

He loves her and she loves somebody else. Such is life. Jean Gabin and Mireille Balin in the terrific Gueule d'amour (1937). This YouTube clip doesn't have any English subtitles, but the DVD does. The film is directed by the criminally underrated Jean Gremillion.

Jean Gabin Book: Fall 2010 Update

2010-10-21T09:39:00.001-07:00

Note: Blogspot.com dates this article as having been written on October 21st, the date I began it, but today, the day I am finishing it, it is actually November 29th.

This photo is a screen capture of Jean Gabin in director Julien Duvivier's 1936 classic, La Belle equipe. In France, La Belle equipe is considered to be one of the top films of the '30s, yet it is almost completely unknown in the United States.

I hope everybody's fall is going very well. Thank you again to everybody who has bought my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, and to those who have recommended the book to others. I can't believe this is my first blog entry since May 29th, exactly half a year ago.

I have spent the past year re-writing and re-editing WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR for a possible 2011 edition (3.0), as well as completing work on my follow-up to my Gabin book, a children's book which should be available in the Spring of 2011, so I will keep everybody posted.

Here are some Jean Gabin Updates from the past summer and early fall:

NINTH ANNUAL SACRAMENTO FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

On Saturday June 27th and Sunday June 28th, I attended the ninth annual Sacramento French Film Festival, where I hosted screenings of two great Jean Gabin movies, 1937's Pepe Le Moko and 1969's The Sicilian Clan. Both of the films were screened two times each, once on Saturday and again on Sunday, and I really enjoyed meeting all of the rabid Jean Gabin fans, and fans of French cinema, in Northern California. I would like, one more time, to thank the festival's founders and programmers, Cecile and John Downs, for making me feel very welcome. The event was notable, too, because it was held a stone's throw from the state capital at the Crest Theater, one of Sacramento's oldest, and most prestigious art-deco movie theaters. The Crest was built in the 1920s by the Loew's theatrical family, and its first incarnation was as a vaudeville house; John Downs even took me behind the movie screen and showed me the original dressing rooms. The Crest Theater features more than nine hundred seats, and about three hundred seats were filled, for each of the four screenings of Jean Gabin films.

A POSSIBLE THIRD PRINTING OF "WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR" IN 2011 + A NEW PROJECT

This year, I have been completing my follow-up to WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, an illustrated children's book which should be available for purchase in Spring 2011. I have also been going through World's Coolest Movie Star, line by line, for a possible 2011 Third Edition ("3.0"), which will include updates, line-by-line deletions and additions, and additional photographs which were not available to me during the book's first two printings. I am always open to reader suggestions, because I see this book as a collaboration between myself and my readers; if you have any ideas for how I can improve my book, they are very welcome, and I would be happy to read them. Please email me at author@jeangabinbook.com.

"LE JOUR SE LEVE" SCREENPLAY SELLS AT LONDON AUCTION FOR $300,000.00 (U.S.)

Back in June, I happened to read that an original screenplay for the 1939 Jean Gabin classic, Le Jour se leve, featuring hand notations made by the film's screenwriter, Jacques Prevert, fetched $300,000.00 (U.S.) at a London auction. At about the same time, when I was scouring eBay for rare Jean Gabin merchandise, I happened to come upon this incredible, one-of-a-kind poster for Le Jour se leve:

This Le Jour se leve poster is not only one of the best posters for a Jean Gabin movie I have ever seen, but it might also be one of the greatest movie posters I have ever seen, period. And it's only selling for $4,000.00 on eBay. (Anybody want to spot me 4K so I can buy it?)

MESRINE: A NEW FRENCH GANGSTER MOVIE

In September 2010, a new French gangster film was released in the U.S., director Jean-Francois Richert's two-part epic, Mesrine, starring Vincent Cassel as France's most notorious 1970s' gangster. I haven't seen the film yet, but some critics have been comparing it very favorably to Jean Gabin's old gangster classics from the 1950s, Touchez pas au grisbi and Razzia sur la chnouf. The four-hour Mesrine, which was released both in France and in the U.S. in two parts, as Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, also features the very striking actress Cecile de France, who is also currently on view in director Clint Eastwood's loathesome new soaper, Hereafter. I have not yet seen Mesrine, but I am looking forward to it. Here in Los Angeles, The New Beverly Cinema will be screening both parts of the film, for one admission price, on December 22 and 23.

WARNER BROS. DEVELOPING NEW ANIMATED "PEPE LE PEW" FEATURE, BASED ON THE "PEPE LE MOKO" CHARACTER IMMORTALIZED BY JEAN GABIN AND CHARLES BOYER

About three weeks ago, the erstwhile Ain't It Cool News.com announced that Warner Bros. Pictures is currently in active development on a feature-length animated film, no doubt in "the miracle of 3D," which will be based upon the studio's classic cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew. As Jean Gabin fans know, the voice and likeness of the unctuous skunk are based upon the characterizations of the legendary French gangster Pepe le Moko, as portrayed by Jean Gabin in the eponymous film from 1937, as well as by Charles Boyer, in that film's American-made 1938 remake, Algiers. Hopefully, this new animated feature will bring some attention to Jean Gabin's original character.

POSTER FOR NEW MOVIE THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) EMULATES THE LOOK OF THE FRONT JACKET OF MY BOOK WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUME TWO (2008)

On October 2nd, 2010, director David Fincher's great new film The Social Network, the story of Facebook's wunderkind-founder Mark Zuckerberg was released, to enormous critical acclaim. Now, one might be led to believe that there are no connections between the movie The Social Network and my book about Jean Gabin, World's Coolest Movie Star... but think again.

Here is the front jacket of my book World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volume Two, which was released by Allenwood Press in July of 2008,and beneath it, is the poster for the new movie The Social Network, as released in late September 2010:

Question: Do you think that the designer of The Social Network poster ripped off his design from the cover of my book, World's Coolest Movie Star? On both my Gabin book and the movie poster, you'll notice that the title words steer clear of the subjects' eyes and mouths... hmmm... but maybe it's all just a coincidence...?

ROGER EBERT RESPONDS TO MY EMAIL!

On September 30th, Roger Ebert wrote an essay on his blogsite in which he stated that his favorite French gangster movie is 1954's Touchez pas au grisbi, starring Jean Gabin. In his article, Ebert credited Jean Pierre Melville as having directed Grisbi. I left a comment in the comment space under Ebert's article, reminding him that it was Jacques Becker who, in fact, directed that film, and not Melville. The following day, Ebert corrected his mistake in his article, and he also responded, briefly (in one sentence) to my comment, as you can see, if you scroll down to the end of Ebert's article and read the twelfth comment down on the list:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/09/start_out_with_the_first_one.html

ELI WALLACH WINS HONORARY OSCAR, MENTIONS JEAN GABIN AS INFLUENCE

On November 16, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science held its annual Governor's Awards in Los Angeles, presenting lifetime achievements to four individuals who have made great strides in entertainment. Historian Kevin Brownlow and director Francis Ford Coppola won two of the awards.

A third award was presented to avant-garde director Jean-Luc Godard, who did not attend the Hollywood ceremony. In the days and hours leading up to the event, Hollywood pundits debated about whether Godard should, in fact, receive this award, because the filmmaker had reportedly once referrred to somebody as being 'a dirty Jew.' (When asked about this, Godard responded that when he used the phrase 'dirty Jew,' he was just referencing the line that Jean Gabin's character spoke to Marcel Dalio's character at the end of Jean Renoir's seminal film, La Grande illusion.) This author doesn't believe Godard to be anti-Semitic, especially in view of the fact that, in 1986, Godard directed a forty-minute documentary about Woody Allen, Meetin' W.A. , and one year later, Allen was part of the ensemble cast of Godard's English-language feature, King Lear.

On a more positive note, a fourth Governor's Award was presented to the amazing American character actor Eli Wallach, who is ninety-five years old. Interviewed for the Los Angeles Times on November 6th, Wallach cited the French actors Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet -- Jean Gabin's co-star from 1936's classic Les Bas-fonds -- and Jean-Louis Barrault as his major influences:

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/07/entertainment/la-ca-eli-wallach-20101107

Eli Wallach is still going strong at the age of ninety-five, most recently having appeared, briefly, in two movies this year -- Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer and Oliver Stone's Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, and hopefully he will be around forever.

Legendary Eli Wallach. ("If you want to shoot, shoot! Don't talk!")

Finally, I was scouring my hard drive this week and I discovered three great stills of Jean Gabin and Sophia Loren, together on the set of the criminally unknown 1974 film which in France is called Verdict, and in the U.S., A Jury of One. Reportedly, seventy-two year-old Gabin was ready to retire at this point,but Loren refused to do the film unless Gabin signed on to be her co-star. In these photographs, you'll see Jean Gabin, Sophia Loren, an unknown 'groovy' bearded man and, in the third photograph, the picture's director, Andre Cayatte. In 1939, a younger Cayatte was one of the screnwriters of Gabin's classic, Remorques.

Happy Holidays. More soon!

Charles Zigman,
Author,
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.

11-29-10
Older Posts Below:

9th Annual Sacramento French Film Festival Honors Jean Gabin on June 26-27, 2010!

2010-05-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

Sacramento Honors World's Coolest Movie Star Jean Gabin with a Two-Film Tribute.

If you plan on being in Northern California between Friday, June 18th and Sunday, June 27th, 2010, why not head to the 9th Annual Sacramento French Film Festival (www.sacramentofrenchfilmfestival.org)?

Held at the historic Crest theater, this two-weekend festival will screen eight new French films and four great classics.

Two of the classics, director Julien Duvivier’s 1937 masterwork Pepe Le Moko and Henri Verneuil’s 1970 The Sicilian Clan star none other than the great French movie legend Jean Gabin.

Charles Zigman (me!), author of the new book World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes One and Two, will be on-hand to introduce the two Gabin films, and if you miss Pepe Le Moko and Sicilian Clan on Saturday the 26th (Pepe Le Moko screens at 11:00am, and Sicilian Clan unspools at 1:20pm), both films will be repeated on Sunday the 27th – Sicilian Clan at 10:15 am and Pepe Le Moko at 1:00pm.

At the time this posting goes to press, Mary Moncorgé, granddaughter of Jean Gabin, is also scheduled to make an appearance at one or more of the screenings.

On Sunday, author Zigman will even host un Petit Dejeuner – a French breakfast in honor of Jean Gabin – prior to the 10:15 am screening of The Sicilian Clan.

There’s also an Opening Night Reception on Friday, June 18th and a Closing Night Party on Sunday, June 27th.

More more information about the Festival (including a full screening schedule), to purchase tickets, and to learn about a great hotel to stay at if you visit Sacramento, go to
www.sacramentofrenchfilmfestival.org.

The Crest Theater is at:
1013 K Street
Sacramento, CA 95814-3803
(916) 442-5189

Looking forward to meeting you at the Crest Theater for The Sacramento French Film Festival!

Give Jean Gabin for Mother's Day... and Save 50% (at Barnes and Noble.com)

2010-04-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

If you wanted to buy author Charles Zigman's two-volume book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, but you felt that the cost was too prohibitive, here's some good news for you.

Each of the two volumes of the filmography/biography WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR -- Volume One (Gabin's Early Life, 1904 to 1953) and Volume Two (Gabin's Later Life, 1953 to 1976) -- retail at $39.95, so if you buy both volumes, you pay $79.90. That's a lot of money, in the present, or in any, economy.

But between now and May 10, 2010, if you're a paid member of Barnes and Noble's Book Club, with an up-to-date membership number on your B&N membership card, each of the two volumes is only $19.97, when you buy on line at www.barnesandnoble.com.

Here's how the 50% discount breaks down:

Each of the two volumes of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR retails at $39.95.

Barnes and Noble is already offering the book to ALL customers at 10% off ($39.95).

If you're a currently-enrolled member of Barnes and Noble's Book Club, and you enter Coupon Code D7P3D8K during the on-line checkout process, Barnes and Noble.com will lower the price by an additional 40%, bringing the cost of each volume all the way down to $19.97. When you buy both volumes you're saving about $40.00.

If you already own Volume One, and you haven't yet purchased Volume Two, this fifty- percent discount might hopefully be some extra incentive. If you don't own either of the two volumes yet, this is the best time of all to get them.

Barnes and Noble.com is also providing free postage on the books.

Jean Gabin, star of La Grande illusion and Pepe Le Moko, has always been considered to be one of Europe's greatest movie stars -- a true giant in cinema, his importance, in Europe, commensurate with that of Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy. (In fact, Gabin has been called 'The French Bogart' and 'The French Tracy.') While Gabin has always had an incredible cult following in America, true stardom has eluded him here. Hopefully, this book will redress the balance.

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, are now 50% off at Barnes and Noble.com, through May 10, 2010.

Buy them today!

(PS, Barnes and Noble will only let its members take the discount on one book per order, so to order the two volumes, please place two separate orders.)

Jean Gabin: Spring 2010 News, Includes 50% Discount on Jean Gabin Book

2010-03-25T07:36:00.000-07:00

Hope everybody is having a nice spring. Sorry I have not updated this blogsite lately. Here are some recent Jean Gabin odds-and-ends for Spring 2010:

HAPPY 90TH BIRTHDAY TO MICHELE MORGAN.
1. On March 1, 2010, the luminous French actress Michèle Morgan turned 90. Morgan, who lives in Paris, co-starred with Jean Gabin in 1938's Le Quai des brumes, 1939's Le Recif de corail, and 1952's La Minute de verite, and their love scene together in Quai des brumes remains one of the most memorable scenes of that nature in the history of French cinema. In the 2008 film Atonement, a character is even seen in a movie theater, watching Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan on screen together.

A NEW FILM OPENS IN L.A. AND N.Y., DIRECTED BY SON OF FAMOUS JEAN GABIN COLLABORATOR.
2. There's a new French movie playing in the U.S., Un Prophete (A Prophet), a contemporary gangster movie which opened up in New York in Los Angeles on February 26th, and it's still playing. The film was even nominated for an Academy Award, in the Best Foreign Language Film category, however it lost out to an Argentine film, director Juan Jose Campanella's El Secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Her Eyes). Still, this great French movie is definitely worth seeking out. It should be expanding to more cities as this blog posting is going to press.

Un Prophet is relevant to this website because the film's writer and director is 58-year-old Jacques Audiard. Jacques Audiard's late father, Michel Audiard, wrote eighteen of Jean Gabin's ninety-five films -- Gas-Oil (1955), Le Sang a la tete (1956), Le Rouge est mis (1957), Maigret tend un piege (1958), Les Miserables (adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel, 1958), Le Desordre et la nuit (1958), Archimede, le clochard (1959), Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), Rue des Prairies (1959), Le Baron de l'ecluse (1960), Les Vieux de la vieille (1960), Le President (1961), Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), Un Singe en hiver (1962), Le Gentleman d'Epsom (1962), Melodie en sous-sol (1963), Le Pacha (1968), Sous le signe du taureau (1969), and Le Drapeau noir flotte sur la marmite (1971, also directed by Audiard). Audiard Sr. also wrote a five-minute television film for Gabin in December of 1960, which was broadcast in France, for Christmas. Here is the website for Un Prophete: http://www.sonyclassics.com/aprophet/

LOS ANGELES JEAN RENOIR FILM FESTIVAL FEATURES THREE FILMS STARRING JEAN GABIN.
3. In March and April 2010, the Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is screening a nineteen-film tribute to the legendary humanist director, Jean Renoir. This screening includes three films which Renoir directed, starring Jean Gabin. On Saturday March 13th, it's 1955's French Cancan (which also features the Mexican actress Maria Felix); On Friday March 19th, it's La Bete humaine (1938), based on the novel by Emile Zola, and starring Gabin with Simone-Simon; and on Friday March 26th, it's perhaps the most well-known French film ever made, Renoir's anti-war classic La Grande illusion (1937), which co-stars Gabin with Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio, and Eric von Stroheim. All films begin at 7:30pm and are part of double features. For the full schedule, address of LACMA, and prices, please go to http://www.lacma.org/programs/FilmSeriesSchedule.aspx

THE AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE IN LOS ANGELES WILL SCREEN GLENN FORD'S REMAKE OF A JEAN GABIN CLASSIC ON SATURDAY APRIL 10TH, 2010.
4. On Saturday April 10th 2010 at 9:15pm, the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater at 6712 Hollywood Blvd., will unspool a rare 35-mm print of Human Desire, director Fritz Lang's rarely shown American 1953 remake of Jean Renoir's 1938 classic, La Bete humaine. In this fast-paced American remake, Glenn Ford plays the role which Jean Gabin played in the earlier film, and Gloria Grahame assays the role that was originally played by Simone-Simon. Lang's entertaining remake is a very good companion piece to the original Renoir/Gabin version, and it also happens to feature a powerhouse performance by Broderick Crawford as Grahame's paranoid, jilted husband. This screening will be part of the American Cinematheque's 12th Annual Film Noir Festival, programmed by Eddie Muller, and twenty-four other Noir classics will be screened, mostly as double-features, between April 2nd and April 18th, 2010. For more information about the screening of Human Desire, and about other films in the 12th Annual Festival of Film Noir, be sure to visit http://americancinematheque.com/mastercalendar.htm

TWO-VOLUME JEAN GABIN BOOK IS HALF OFF UNTIL APRIL 12, 2010, FOR BARNES AND NOBLE BOOK CLUB MEMBERS ONLY, WITH CHECK-OUT CODE W4U9C8A.
5. If you're a member of Barnes and Noble's book club, you can buy the book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN for fifty percent off. Barnes and Noble.com is already discounting Volume One and Volume Two of the book at 10% off, and if you enter coupon code W4U9C8A at checkout, they are taking an additional 40% off. Since you may take the discount only on one book per order, it is suggested that you place two separate orders -- one order for Volume One and the second order for Volume Two -- if you want to take the discount on both books. B&N is also offering free postage. Remember, this is ONLY for PAID MEMBERS of Barnes and Noble's book club. Until April 12, 2010, each volume is only $19.97, in lieu of the usual $39.95. Basically, with this discount, you're getting two volumes for the price of one. Click on the title of this article to go right to the Barnes and Noble.com Jean Gabin Book Page.

Have a wonderful spring.

Charles Zigman,
Author,
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN,
VOLUME ONE: TRAGIC DRIFTER (ISBN #978-0-9799722-0-1) and
VOLUME TWO: COMEBACK/PATRIARCH (ISBN #978-0-9799722-1-8).
www.jeangabinbook.com

50% OFF JEAN GABIN BOOK THROUGH 3/29/10, BARNES AND NOBLE.COM BOOK CLUB MEMBERS ONLY! ONE WEEK ONLY!

2010-03-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

BULLETIN:

Spring into daylight savings time with 50% off on the book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, by Charles Zigman. Normally, each of the two volumes sells for $39.95, but through March 29, 2010, you can buy BOTH volumes for a total of $39.95 -- or $19.97 each.

SPRING SPECIAL FOR MEMBERS OF BARNES AND NOBLE BOOK CLUB, ONLY: Between now and March 22, 2010, members of Barnes and Noble.com's Book Club may take 50% off of the book "World's Coolest Movie Star," by entering coupon code U7J7W8J during the checkout process. (B&N is offering 10% off, plus the coupon code entitles you to take an extra 40@% off.) Free postage is included, as well.

Click on the title of this article and you will be taken directly to the WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR page on Barnes and Noble.com.

IMPORTANT: Please note that this discount applies to Barnes and Noble Book Club members ONLY. You may only take the fifty percent discount on one book in each order, so to order both Volume One and Volume Two at the fifty percent discount, you must place two separate orders.

Until March 29, 2010 buy WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR at $19.97 instead of the usual $39.95!

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR is the first book in the English language about the amazing French movie legend Jean Gabin. It is part biography and part filmography and features more than 200 photographs, many of which have never appeared in print. Brigitte Bardot and Michele Morgan have contributed forewords to the book and Gabin fan David Mamet has supplied an Appreciation.

Thank you for your interest in Jean Gabin.

WWW.JEANGABINBOOK.COM

When Trevor Howard Met Jean Gabin

2010-02-01T19:26:00.001-08:00

Trevor Howard, that finest of British film actors.

Part of the joy of maintaining this blogsite – which, I admit, I don’t do as much as I should – includes the fact that, on occasion, I receive very nice fan mail for my two-volume filmography/biography, World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin (www.jeangabinbook.com) – of course, World's Coolest Movie Star is the very first English-language book about France’s greatest film actor. Even better, sometimes a reader of my book will relate to me an anecdote about Gabin with which I had been previously unfamiliar.

Yesterday, I was delighted to receive just such an email from Michael Pointon, a television producer who, back in the 1980s, interviewed one of the greatest of all British film stars – the legendary Trevor Howard, who will be familiar to you from such films as Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Lewis Milestone's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

In his email, Pointon illuminates me as to a meeting between Trevor Howard and Jean Gabin, which transpired in Paris. I was not aware that these two fine thespians had ever met, so I thank Mr. Pointon for sending me the email.

Here is that email:

“Dear Mr Zigman,

I am enjoying your comprehensive, meticulously-researched and warmly enthusiastic Jean Gabin book. I have been a follower of Gabin’s work for many years, and such a work is long-overdue.

It's clearly a labor of love on your part, and I have an anecdote you may not have heard that might be of use.

I have worked in radio and television documentaries for many years, and one of my assignments, in the early ‘80s, was to interview Trevor Howard, who is probably Britain's finest screen actor.

After asking Howard all of the usual questions and talking with him about his long career, I decided to ask him who his favorite cinema actors were. He instantly named Spencer Tracy and Jean Gabin, two actors to whom his own work had been compared.

Howard was a remarkably reserved man and it had taken a long time for me to persuade him to consent to an interview – probably something he had in common with Gabin. I never thought of asking if he'd actually met Gabin so, to my surprise, some years after his death, one of his biographers wrote of an encounter between Howard and Gabin which has the ring of truth: It seems that Howard was in Paris to publicize a movie he'd made and, as was his wont, he was drinking in a bistro with the film’s producer. Suddenly, to his surprise, a trenchcoat-wearing man crossed the darkened room towards his table, thrust his hand towards Howard, and introduced himself by name, very simply: “Gabin.” Howard stood up in surprise, grasped the outstretched hand, and replied, just as simply, “Howard.” Apparently Jean Gabin and Trevor Howard embraced and left the bistro together – and the producer of Howard’s film didn't see him again for another two days!

Somehow this feels true and, in fact, Howard’s producer related the incident to author Terence Pettigrew. This anecdote is referenced in Pettigrew’s book, TREVOR HOWARD: A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY...

Kind regards and best wishes,

Michael Pointon”

France's Jean Gabin, the World's Coolest Movie Star.

World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes One and Two, is available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and it may also be ordered at a bookseller near you. You may take 40% off the book at Barnes and Noble.com between now and February 10, 2010, when you enter coupon code U4C7L7Y at checkout. (Barnes and Noble is offering the book at 10% off already, so this coupon code entitles you to an extra 30% off. You can only get the discount on one book per order, so to get the discount on each of the two volumes, simply place two orders. These books are postpaid.)

Film Director/Author Florence Moncorgé-Gabin, Daughter of Jean Gabin, Visits a French Film Class

2010-01-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

Film director/author Florence Moncorgé-Gabin, daughter of Jean Gabin, teaches a Film History course in Mordelles, France on January 19, 2010.

The website Ouest-France (www.ouest-france.fr) reported on January 20th, 2010 that forty-four students in Mordelles, France (in Brittany, in the northwest) at the private L'Immaculée high school had some very good fortune on Tuesday the 19th: Their guest speaker was Florence Moncorgé-Gabin, a great filmmaker and author who also happens to be one of the two daughters of the legendary French movie actor, Jean Gabin.

Florence Moncorgé-Gabin, who began as a script-girl on a number of films in the '70s and '80s, including her father's final film, 1976's L'Année sainte , directed her own feature film in 2008, the heart-wrenching pastoral epic Le Passager de l'été ( The Passenger of the Summer.)

Moncorgé spent the afternoon inculcating the students, in the Cinema and Literature course, with a love of great French films which are thematically similar to her own film, director Claude Berri's 1986 film adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. As she told the journalist from Ouest-France, "Hopefully, watching these films will motivate the students to experience and appreciate [other relevant] authors like Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas." The students were apparently taken by Ms. Moncorgé-Gabin's friendliness and accessibility, a hallmark of her father's on-screen persona.

Florence Moncorgé-Gabin has written two books about her father, 2002's Quitte à avoir un père, autant qu'il s'appelle Gabin (If You Have to Have a Father, It Might as Well Be Gabin) and 2004's Gabin hors champ (Gabin, Off-Camera), co-written with her brother, Mathias Moncorge.

Ms. Moncorgé's 2002 book, a memory of what it was like to be Jean Gabin's daughter. The English language translation of the book's French title is, If You Have to Have a Father, It Might As Well Be Gabin.

Lionsgate films has made Ms. Moncorgé-Gabin's film, Le Passager de l'été, available for you to watch on-line right now, with English subtitles, at Amazon.com, as a digital download ONLY. You can download the film for one day for $2.99, or you can download it and keep it forever for $9.99. Click on the title of this article and it will take you directly to the Amazon.com page to watch the film. Unfortunately, downloading is the only way to watch the film, at present, with English subtitles; there is no DVD to buy.

2010 Begins with a New Jean Gabin DVD Release: It's 1966's Gabin/Robert Stack Team-Up, Action Man (AKA, Le Soleil des voyous)

2010-01-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

Jean Gabin and Robert Stack in the fun 1966 heist thriller Action Man (Le Soleil des voyous). It will be available on DVD, in North America, on January 26, 2010.

Happy New Year from www.jeangabinbook.com. Thank you to everybody who gave (and received) my book, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, for the holidays.

2010 starts out with a brand new Jean Gabin DVD release, available in an English languge version for the first time on home video:

It's director Jean Delannoy's Le Soleil des voyous (Action Man), a fun, engaging "one-last-heist picture" from 1966 which co-starred Gabin with Elliott Ness himself -- t.v.'s Robert Stack!

I'm pleased to announce that this fun Technicolor thriller is pure fun for fans of Jean Gabin, Robert Stack, as well as for anybody who enjoys great heist movies. In Action Man, Gabin and Stack heist a military payroll with tragic results for one of the two stars, but I won't reveal which one until you catch the movie.

Le Soleil des voyous (Action Man) is one of the six films which Delannoy, a distant French cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, directed with his friend Jean Gabin in the lead. A literal English translation of the title Le Soleil des voyous is something like, "Sun Over the No-Goods." You can see why the American distributors re-titled it, Action Man!

Action Man, at this point, will only be available on DVD as part of a two-DVD/four movie set issued by VCI Entertainment, which VCI has entitled, "The Action Man Collection." The other three features in the set, none of which I have yet seen, do NOT have Gabin in them. The other three titles in the package are:

Peking Blonde (1967) -- An international intrigue thriller with Edward G. Robinson and Mireille Darc;
The Big Game (1967) -- soldier-of-fortune picture with Stephen Boyd, Cameron Mitchell, and Ray Milland; and
The Day of the Wolves (1972) -- bank-robbery western, starring Richard Egan, Martha Hyer, and the American comedian Jan Murray.

As far as I can tell, the print of Action Man which will be available in this package will be dubbed into English; normally, like any serious cineaste, I prefer subtitles over dubbing, but I actually saw this English-dubbed version in 2004when I began researching my Jean Gabin book (UCLA had/has a 16-millimeter print in its Film Archives), and I remember the dubbing as being quite acceptable, bordering on very, very good. Jean Gabin is one of those actors for whom the voice is a big part of the persona, but, from what I remember, whoever dubbed his voice into English did a serviceable job.

Even though Jean Gabin is the first-billed star of Action Man, VCI Entertainment, distributors of the U.S. DVD, neglected to put his picture on the box; this is understandable, however, in view of the fact that Gabin is less known in America than Robert Stack.

I have never seen the French-language print of Action Man, but I would love to, because, famously, Stack did all of his dialogue in French; Robert Stack, as I have mentioned in my Jean Gabin book, grew up on military bases throughout France, so he spoke the language fluently. Here is a five minute clip from the French print of Le Soleil des voyous/Action Man. About four-and-a-half minutes in, you will hear Stack speaking fluent French:

The mob sends thug Robert Stack to bust up Jean Gabin's bar/restaurant in Action Man (1966). When Stack arrives, he is surprised to find that the bar is owned by his good friend and war-buddy Gabin -- the American and the Frenchman fought together in Indochina, in the '50s! It won't be long before Gabin and Stack are teaming up, to get the goods on the mob.

In fact, here is a six minute interview Stack gave to French television in 1966, in which he expresses his great admiration for Jean Gabin. More of Stack speaking French:

http://www.ina.fr/art-et-culture/cinema/video/I00012196/robert-stack-47-ans-elliott-ness-est-un-grand-admirateur-de-jean-gabin.fr.html

I am looking forward to reporting on more Jean Gabin news and events in 2010, as well as telling you about my new projects.

Sincerely,

Charles Zigman,
author,
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN,
VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.
www.jeangabinbook.com

Leonard Maltin Picks Book About Jean Gabin as One of His Best Books of 2009

2009-12-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

Hi, Everybody:

I can't believe it's been almost two months since my last post. Thank you for your interest in Jean Gabin, and in my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.

I had some pretty good news this week: Leonard Maltin picked WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR as one his favorite movie books of 2009 and, as you can see, the book is in pretty good company:

http://www.leonardmaltin.com/2009YearEndBookSurvey.htm

Leonard Maltin

And now, here comes a crass sales pitch. (Believe me, I'm the least likely salesman on earth -- I hate when people try and sell me things! -- so I apologize in advance!)

If you haven't already bought WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, now's the time: While each of the two volumes is $39.95 at Amazon.com (total, $79.90 if you buy the two volumes), Barnes and Noble.com is selling them for $35.95 for each volume -- that's a total of $71.80 if you purchase both Volume One and Volume Two (or, a savings of $8.00). And remember: This is the expanded/revised 2009/2010 edition, which features more biographical information and photographs, as well as reader-submitted additions, deletions, and corrections.

If you already own the two-volume set of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, please think about buying a copy or two for anybody on your holiday shopping list who likes classic movies.

Thank you!

Chuck Zigman,
author,
Los Angeles
www.jeangabinbook.com

Breaking News: Jean Gabin Book Wins First Place (Gold) in USA Book News National Book Awards

2009-10-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

Woke up with some good news this morning:

My new book, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN (Allenwood Press) has won First Place (Gold) in the USA Book News National Best Book Awards for 2009, in the category of Performing Arts.

The two-volume book is a complete biography and filmography of the legendary French movie star, who starred in such internationally recognized classic films as Pepe Le Moko, La Grande Illusion, Le Jour se leve, La Bete humaine, and Le Quai des brumes.

Gabin has always been considered to be France's #1 movie star of all time, and the goal of my book is for the actor to be as apreciated in the English-speaking world as he's always been in the France. To that end, the tone of the book is "fun" and "accessible," and each of the two volumes features more than 100 photographs.

Actresses Brigitte Bardot and Michele Morgan have written original forewords and David Mamet has contributed an appreciation.

Learn more about the book at:
www.jeangabinbook.com

To read about the 2009 USA Book News National Book Awards, go to:
http://www.usabooknews.com/2009bestbooksawards.html

NYC's Julien Duvivier Festival Comes to Berkeley, Includes Four Julien Duvivier/Jean Gabin Collaborations

2009-10-08T18:45:00.001-07:00

"This cous-cous needs more tumeric!"
French acting legend Jean Gabin as smooth criminal Pepe Le Moko in director Julien Duvivier's 1937 gangster classic. This film and four other Gabin/Duvivier collaborations, will be presented in October, at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, as part of the Archive's sixteen-film tribute to the legendary French director, Julien Duvivier.

West Coast Jean Gabin Fans who were unable to make it to New York City this past May -- those of us who missed the Museum of Modern Art's Twenty-Two Gun (Twenty-Two Film) Salute to the legendary French director Julien Duvivier -- will now have our own chance to see the same festival, presented here, on the 'left' coast: Throughout the month of October, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives is showing a scaled-down sixteen-film version of MoMa's twenty-two film festival, including all four of the Duvivier/Gabin collaborations which MoMa presented in NYC earlier this year. (In all Julien Duvivier directed seven features which starred his good friend, Jean Gabin.)

All of director Duvivier's films are quite good (he's a genre filmmaker who subverts traditional genre filmmaking via the inclusion of often "trippy" proto-psychedelic sections), and the director's Gabin entries are some of his very strongest.

On Thursday October 8th (@ 6:30pm) and Friday October 9th (@ 8:30pm), you'll have your chance to see the most famous Duvivier/Gabin collaboration of all, 1937's Pepe Le Moko, in which Le Gabin plays the archetype for all film noir anti-heroes to come. In this seminal film, the charismatic criminal Pepe Le Moko hides out in the weird Dr. Seuss-via-Hieronymous Bosch Casbah region of Algiers, avoiding the police who are ever on his tail.

On Friday October 16th, La Bandera (1935) comes to Berkeley. In this outstanding adventure, Gabin's character, Pierre Gilieth, kills a pimp in Paris, high-tails it out of France, joins the Spanish Foreign Legion, and runs up against a crooked cop who's bent on capturing him. Of course, he'll fall in love with a mysterious dark beauty -- Arab girl Aischa, played by Annabella (a great French actress who was also the real-life wife of Tyrone Power).

On Sunday October 18th at 5:00pm, you'll get to see the jewel in the Gabin/Duvivier crown: It's the ultra-rare 1936 confection La Belle Equipe, a warm summer idyll which has been out of circulation of late, even in France, the country of its production. In La Belle equipe, a powerful comedy-drama which has not been seen in the U.S. since its initial release seventy-one years ago in 1938 (!), Gabin and four friends together win the lottery. They use their earnings to open up a countryside guinguette (combination hotel and dance hall), with results both amusing and tragic. Gabin even sings in this one, as he did in many of his other films. (You can hear the song in this warm summer idyll, "Quand on se promene au bord de l'eau." if you visit the website for my book about Jean Gabin, at www.jeangabinbook.com. La Belle equipe is one of the best movies ever about the ramifications of The Great Depression, its after-effects having spread to Europe.)

On Friday October 30th, at 8:25pm, it's the stark raving mad Voici le temps des Assassins (U.S. release title, Deadlier Than the Male) one of the most violent, loopy, weird film noir titles ever -- it's a Jim Thompson novel on meth! Gabin is a middle-aged chef with an overbearing mother who gets grifted by a team of mother-and-daughter prostitutes, and the film displays some jaw-dropping kinkiness that seems right out of a Russ Meyer movie. Voici le temps is one of those rare movies wherein, after it's over, you won't be able to get up. (After it's over, you'll turn to the person sitting next to you and ask, vis-a-vis the genuinely shocking and one-of-a-kind ending, "Did I see what I think I just saw?" Yes, you did.) It's appropriate that Pacific Film Archives is showing this film on Halloween weekend. It's as spooky as any horror film.

The Pacific Film Archives is located at 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph) in Berkeley.

Here is a full-schedule of the entire series. Series coordinated at PFA by Susan Oxtoby. Program notes adapted from texts by Joshua Siegel, associate curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and by Lenny Borger.

___________________________________
“Genius is just a word; filmmaking is a craft.”—Julien Duvivier

Jean Renoir once proclaimed, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of (Julien) Duvivier above the entrance. . . . This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet.” The French director and screenwriter Julien Duvivier (1896–1967), whose astonishingly varied career spanned both Europe and Hollywood, was also championed by Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, and Graham Greene. This retrospective offers a rare chance to discover the work of this influential filmmaker.

Working in a darkly poetic realist style—Greene wrote admiringly that “his mood is violent, and belongs to the underside of the stone”—Duvivier made popular melodramas, thrillers, religious epics, comedies, wartime propaganda, musicals, and literary adaptations of novels by Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and Georges Simenon. This exhibition features rarities and revelations, as well as masterpieces starring the great actor Jean Gabin, including La belle équipe (1936), Pépé le Moko (1937), and Deadlier Than the Male (1956). Also featured is Duvivier’s favorite among his films, Poil de Carotte (1932), a heartbreaking chronicle of childhood.

Joshua Siegel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Friday, October 2, 2009
6:30 p.m. The Whirlwind of Paris (France, 1927). Judith Rosenberg on piano. This rare silent features Lil Dagover, a star of German Expressionist cinema, as an opera singer who becomes restless in her marriage and longs to return to the Parisian stage. (108 mins)

Friday, October 2, 2009
8:50 p.m. Poil de Carotte (France, 1932). Duvivier’s favorite among his own films is a poignant portrait of a lonely farm boy, a “classic chronicle of childhood.”— Lenny Borger (91 mins)

Sunday, October 4, 2009
4:00 p.m. La vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin France, 1929). Judith Rosenberg on piano. A stark and striking biography of sainted Carmelite nun Thérèse de Lisieux. (113 mins)

JEAN GABIN: Thursday, October 8, 2009 6:30 p.m. Pépé le Moko (France, 1937). Duvivier’s most influential film stars Jean Gabin as a suave Parisian jewel thief who eludes capture by taking refuge in the Casbah. “I cannot remember (a picture) which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level.”— Graham Greene (94 mins)

"Come with me to the Casbah... we will make ze beautiful muzeek togezaire, no?!" Jean Gabin didn't really say this in Pepe Le Moko (1937), but everybody thinks he did. (It's similar to how Cary Grant never really said, "Judy, Judy, Judy...")

Friday, October 9, 2009
6:30 p.m. Au bonheur des dames (France, 1930). Judith Rosenberg on piano. Depicting the life of a Parisian department store and a small shop trying to survive in its shadow, Duvivier’s final silent film is “an orgy of pure cinema (and an) alternately sincere and cynical hymn to capitalist endeavor.”—Village Voice (c. 85 mins)

JEAN GABIN: Friday, October 9, 2009 8:30 p.m. Pépé le Moko (France, 1937). See October 8. (94 mins)

Wednesday, October 14, 2009
7:00 p.m. Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (France/Germany, 1932). Young switchboard operators in Paris and Berlin flirt across telephone lines, national borders, and romance languages in this celebration of continental cosmopolitanism between the wars. A major rediscovery that reveals Duvivier’s lighter, more experimental side. (89 mins)

JEAN GABIN: Friday, October 16, 2009 6:30 p.m. La Bandera (France, 1935). Duvivier’s sensuous and brooding Foreign Legion melodrama made Jean Gabin a star. “It looks like an exquisite newsreel taken away and baked brown to give you the feel of the air.”— Alistair Cooke (100 mins)

Aftermath of man stealing Jean Gabin's wallet in La Bandera (1935).

Saturday, October 17, 2009
5:15 p.m. The Great Waltz (France, 1938). Duvivier made his Hollywood debut with this opulent MGM musical, a symphony of lavish set pieces depicting the romantic early years of composer Johann Strauss. (103 mins)

Sunday, October 18, 2009
JEAN GABIN: 5:00 p.m. La belle équipe (France, 1936). Made in an era of political and social tumult, Duvivier’s film uses beautifully fluid camerawork, pastoral settings, and popular song to trace five workers’ efforts to rise out of poverty. Jean Gabin leads the ensemble cast. (101 mins)

Gabin and his friends decide what to do with their lottery winnings, in La Belle equipe (1936).

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
7:00 p.m. La Fin du jour (France, 1938). One of French cinema’s most poignant, and caustic, portraits of the world of theater depicts an old-age home for destitute actors who wistfully relive their past triumphs and defeats. With Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Victor Francen, and other greats. (100 mins)

Saturday, October 24, 2009
6:30 p.m. La Tête d’un homme (France, 1933). Harry Baur stars in “one of the first great screen incarnations of Georges Simenon’s famous sleuth, Inspector Maigret. . . . Both a classic film noir and a seminal police procedural.”—Lenny Borger (98 mins)

Sunday, October 25, 2009
3:00 p.m. Anna Karenina (U.K., 1948). Vivien Leigh stars in Duvivier’s lavish adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel. This gorgeous print highlights Henri Alekan’s moodily atmospheric cinematography. (111 mins)

Thursday, October 29, 2009
6:30 p.m. Holiday for Henrietta (France, 1952). Two screenwriters dispute the fate of their charming heroine in this enchanting classic that sends up the clash between comedy and drama. (118 mins)

JEAN GABIN: Friday, October 30, 2009 8:25 p.m. Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier Than the Male) (France, 1956). Danièle Delorme plays the quintessential femme fatale, hooking restaurateur Jean Gabin, in “Duvivier’s darkest study of moral depravity.”—Lenny Borger (114 mins)

Chef Gabin and his young protege are both in love with an inscrutable woman who plays them against each other (it's happened to the best of us!) with tragic results, in Voici le temps des assassins (1957).

Saturday, October 31, 2009
6:30 p.m. Pot-Bouille (France, 1957). Adapting a Zola novel, Duvivier creates a scintillating satire of the Second Empire bourgeoisie. The sterling cast is headed by Gérard Philipe and Danielle Darrieux. (115 mins)

Series coordinated at PFA by Susan Oxtoby. Program notes adapted by Oxtoby from texts by Joshua Siegel, associate curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and by Lenny Borger.

PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this retrospective: Joshua Siegel, The Museum of Modern Art; Éric Le Roy and Jean-Baptiste Garnero, CNC French Film Archives; Monique Faulhaber, Cinémathèque Française; Sandrine Butteau and Delphine Selles, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; Christophe Musitelli and Cecile Hokes, French Consulate, San Francisco; Gilles Venhard, Gaumont; René Chateau, Edition René Chateau; Gyslaine Gracieux and Nils Offet, TF1 International; Nathalie Graumann, Société nouvelle de distribution; Archer Neilson; and Christian Duvivier for his support of this project.

Archival prints and musical accompaniment for silent films are presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute.

Read: WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN by Charles Zigman (www.jeangabinbook.com)

Jean Gabin Almost Played Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather"

2009-09-29T19:53:00.001-07:00

Here's a "new" revelation about Jean Gabin that I just learned about, courtesy of Professor Philp Horne's new article in the London Daily Telegraph:

I already knew, from watching the documentary featurettes which appear on the recent Blu-Ray release of The Godfather, that Francis Ford Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play Don Vito Corleone, and that Paramount was constantly fighting him on the idea, and suggesting other actors. I didn't know, however, that Jean Gabin was on the movie studio's short list to play movie history's greatest mafioso patriarch.

Of course, it makes sense: During this period of his career, Jean Gabin had made a habit of playing level-headed, white-haired crime family patriarchs. In 1969's crackerjack suspense thriller The Sicilian Clan, directed by Henri Verneuil, Gabin even played a Mafia Don -- Don Vittorio Manalese.

Here is Professor Horne's illuminating new article about The Godfather, featuring a mention of Jean Gabin.

THE GODFATHER: 'NOBODY ENJOYED ONE DAY OF IT'
Just like the film, the making of 'The Godfather’ was an ugly story of fear and dysfunction.
By Philip Horne
London Daily Telegraph, September 22, 2009

"What was the formula that made The Godfather one of the most successful films of all time? Surely it would take an unusually harmonious combination of talents working in concert, a rare balance of commercial entertainment and artistic challenge, a run of luck those involved couldn’t miss.

"The Godfather... was nominated for 11 Oscars, winning three, and on its $6 million budget, [it] grossed $101 million for Paramount within 18 weeks on release.

"'It was the most miserable film I can think of to make,' declares its producer, Al Ruddy. “Nobody enjoyed one day of it.” Coppola agrees: 'It was just non-stop anxiety and wondering when I was going to get fired.' The novel by Mario Puzo could easily not have been written: eight publishers passed on the outline for a would-be best-seller pitched by a middle-ranking, mid-forties writer with a bad gambling habit and big debts. Only bumping into a friend had led to his actually writing The Godfather. Its 67 weeks topping the New York Times best-seller list surprised everyone.

"Paramount bought an option when Puzo had only written 100 pages, for a mere $12,500, rising to $50,000 if the novel was filmed. But maybe – if we’re to credit Paramount’s head of production Robert Evans – Paramount very nearly didn’t acquire it. There was a bidding war: they were 'one day away from Burt Lancaster buying The Godfather, and Burt wanted to play the Don.'

"Coppola was no one’s first choice. A pack of others were considered: Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger, Richard Brooks, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Franklin J Schaffner, Richard Lester… All said no. Finally, Evans decided Mafia movies hadn’t worked because, 'they were usually written by Jews, directed by Jews and acted by Jews' – and the only Italian-American director with any track record was the up-and-coming Coppola. He almost said no, too, thinking Puzo’s opus 'a popular, sensational novel, pretty cheap stuff.'

"But Coppola relented, partly because his company American Zoetrope was broke. Once aboard, he saw in this blockbuster the profound story of 'a king, almost Greek – a king with three sons.' Puzo liked him. Henceforth, though, everything was a fight. The studio wanted to keep costs down by setting the film in present-day Kansas City; Coppola refused, demanding and getting a $5 million budget. He demanded an 80 day shooting schedule; Paramount gave him only 53.

"Then there was the question of who would play Don Vito Corleone? Paramount had sounded out Anthony Quinn; but also on their list were Laurence Olivier – who was ill – George C Scott, Jean Gabin, Vittorio De Sica, John Huston, Paul Scofield, Victor Mature… Coppola wanted Marlon Brando, whose name was then dirt with the studios due to unreliability and a string of flops. Paramount president Stan Jaffe declared, 'Marlon Brando will never appear in this picture,' even forbidding further discussion. But Coppola pleaded to the bosses that Brando was the greatest living screen actor, and finally, extravagantly, collapsed on the carpet before their eyes. They thought he’d had a heart attack brought on by an excess of sincerity and gave in, though on tough terms.

"The rest of the casting was problematic, too. Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal as Michael, the Don’s son; happily the Redford deal fell through. Rod Steiger wanted to do it. Warren Beatty turned it down. Martin Sheen, David Carradine and Dean Stockwell were considered. Even Robert De Niro tested for it: the footage that survives is remarkable. Only Coppola saw Al Pacino’s depths; casting director Fred Roos found him 'this sort of runty little guy.' Coppola prevailed. Pacino was paid only $35,000, but came through.

"James Caan, already a name, was tested for Michael, but was best suited for the part he got, Sonny. John Cazale as Fredo was perfect. For Robert Duvall’s part as the consigliere Tom Hagen, both John Cassavetes and Peter Falk approached Coppola. Coppola objected to casting his sister, Talia Shire, as Connie Corleone, yelling at their mother that Shire was too pretty. But she stayed in, and it became a family film: he eventually included his parents, and even his three-week-old daughter, Sofia.

"The shoot itself was a nightmare. 'My history with The Godfather was very much the history of someone in trouble,' says Coppola. He knew early on 'they were not happy with what I had done…,' and expected to be fired at any moment. In the men’s room he heard crew members talking: about the film – 'What a piece of junk!;' and about him – 'This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.' Coppola was constantly undermined. Indeed, Elia Kazan was lined up as a possible replacement. Coppola 'kept dreaming that Kazan would arrive on the set and would say to me, 'Uh, Francis, I’ve been asked to…’' But Brando nobly said he would walk off the picture if Coppola was fired. Pacino, too, expected the boot: 'I always felt that I still had to win these people over.' He was convinced 'I was out – and then the Sollozzo scene came.' They loved his intensity as he takes bloody revenge in that great sequence in the restaurant.

"Brando came good. Coppola notes that 'without exception, every one of his crazy ideas I used turned out to be a terrific moment.'

"Coppola wanted to fill the film with 'hundreds and hundreds of interesting specifics,' one example being the cat Brando cradles in the first scene. It wandered onto the set, Coppola befriended it and settled it on Brando’s lap.

"Further disagreements abounded. Evans thought it unnecessary to shoot the Don’s death scene, now one of the best-remembered moments of the film. Cinematographer Gordon Willis thought Coppola unprofessional – Coppola said Willis 'hates and misuses actors.' Still, the end result is tremendous, radiating a powerful darkness. Even the now iconic music, by Nino Rota, was disliked by Evans. A favourable preview audience saved its bacon.

"Finally, there’s the length. Coppola chopped it down, on Paramount’s strict instructions, to a paltry 135 minutes (for exhibitors’ convenience). Then, Evans says, he himself turned on Coppola: 'You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie.' The film was restored to its nearly three hours, and the rest is history – and movie legend."

Philip Horne teaches literature and film in the Department of English at University College London

Michele Morgan vs. Qatar!

2009-09-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan, as they appear in director Jean Delannoy's searing 1952 melodrama, La Minute de verite (1952).

For more than twenty years, the iconic French actress Michele Morgan, who co-starred with Jean Gabin in four great motion pictures -- Le Recif de corail (1938), Le Quai des brumes (1939), Remorques (1939/41), and La Minute de verite (1952) -- lived in the Hotel Lambert, a 17th Century mansion on the eastern tip of Paris. In 2007, a Qatarian Sheik bought the hotel, and he is now seeking to refurbish it in a way which many conservationists feel to be anachronistic with the original intent of the building. Morgan, who is today 89 years old, is working with the conservationists to try and stop this from happening.

Here is a very good article about the situation, written by Hannah Westley on September 12, 2009, for The National, the daily newspaper of the United Arab Emirates:

"Its façade may be less recognisable than the Louvre or the Sacré Coeur, but the history of the Hôtel Lambert, the 17th-century mansion at the eastern tip of Paris’ Ile Saint Louis, is in many ways no less remarkable. Currently at the heart of a polemic concerning its restoration, this hôtel particulier was once the epicentre of romantic Paris when it welcomed the likes of Voltaire, Chopin, Delacroix and George Sand. It is the mansion’s history and the way it is intertwined with the very fabric of the building’s construction that has made the Hôtel Lambert a cause célèbre for the Ile Saint Louis’s celebrity residents.

It was bought in 2007 by Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, brother to the Emir of Qatar, from the Baron Guy de Rothschild for a sum estimated to be somewhere between €60 million (Dh321m) and €80m. The building’s restoration project was handed to Alain-Charles Perrot, the chief architect of France’s historic monuments, and whose responsibility is their safeguarding and protection. The Qatari Prince wishes to restore the Lambert, classed as a Unesco heritage site, to its original function as a family home by uniting the present three apartments into a single dwelling. While this would appear to be a relatively unproblematic undertaking, what have caused more concern among conservationists are the proposed plans for an underground car park, which critics suggest could put at risk the building’s foundations, a lift and new bathrooms. Concerns have also been raised about the proposed transformation of the mansion’s hanging garden. In a move to protect against these changes, an association for the protection of historic Paris has gone to court to try to reverse official approval of the project.

Designed by Louis le Vau, the architect responsible for enlarging the Château of Versailles and building the famous castle Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Hôtel Lambert was constructed between 1639 and 1644 for Jean-Baptiste Lambert, secretary to Louis XIII. It houses some spectacular works of art including wall paintings and murals by le Brun, who went on to paint Versaille’s world-famous Galerie des Glaces. Armed with a petition of 8,000 signatures, lawyers for historic Paris have argued that the plans should be abandoned in the interests of national pride. Members of the hallowed Académie Française have also raised their objections. “Would they drill through the beams and floorboards of the Villa Medici to make room for an elevator shaft?” the academician Jean-Marie Rouart was heard to ask.

Other voices of dissent have come from more surprising quarters and include celebrities such as the comedian Guy Bedos, the singer Georges Moustaki and the iconic film star Michèle Morgan, who lived in the Lambert for 20 years. Other support has come from abroad, including Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Italian architects Ricardo Florio and Edoardo Piccoli, the Canadian professors Myra Nan Rosenfeld and Georges Teyssot and the British art historian Mary Whiteley.

One of the problems with the architect’s original proposal was his intention to restore the mansion to its 17th-century glory, thereby suppressing the 18th-century elements as well as the 19th-century stained glass windows. Guidelines for the restoration of historic monuments, as laid out in the 1964 Venice Charter, indicate that unity of style should not be the aim of restoration, which should seek to conserve historical additions made over the centuries.

At the time of the prince’s purchase of the Lambert, many commentators remarked upon how France’s close diplomatic ties with Qatar are beginning to yield significant commercial advantages. Since the independence of Qatar in 1971, France has maintained strong links with this Francophile state, which has become a major economic force in Europe. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa was the first Arab head of state invited to the Elysée palace by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. The Sheikh is said to have a direct line to the Elysée and the two men enjoy a close working relationship. It can only be hoped that the Hôtel Lambert does not come between them."

Here's the Hotel Lambert's "new owner," Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (not to be confused with Frank Zappa's alter-ego "Sheik Yerbouti" from the 1978 double album) and, apparently, he thinks nothing of placing a glass elevator in a 17th-century building! Hopefully, thanks to Michele Morgan and her hearty team of conservationist-commandos, he will soon have a healthy sense of "buyer's remorse!"

Don't "Come with me to the Casbah:" On the Getty Center's Disappointing Algiers Exhibit

2009-09-28T11:37:00.001-07:00

Visitors from France recently -- the Bardet/Danton family, who helped me when I was in France a few years ago, researching, and viewing films for, my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS AND LEGEND OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO (www.jeangabinbook.com).

The Bardet family -- husband and wife Lolo and Jean-Paul and their two kids Laetitia and Louis -- had never been to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, so I thought it would be a good excuse for me to catch up with the Getty's temporary exhibit, WALLS OF ALGIERS: NARRATIVES OF THE CITY, which will be in place through October 18th.

Of course, the famed Casbah section of the city of Algiers is famous for having appeared in Jean Gabin's legendary 1937 film Pepe Le Moko. I was looking forward to this exhibit, because I thought I would be treated not only to breathtaking images of Algiers, but also (maybe, I had hoped) some props or an original poster from the film? In short, I thought this exhibit would give me a comprehensive lesson in "all-things Casbah."

I was very disappointed to find that the Getty has relegated its Algiers exhibit to a small, 12 x 12 square-foot bedroom-sized room in a minor building, in the very back of the Getty Center, called The Exhbition Gallery. Very literally, the exhibit features two hanging maps of Algiers, a photo of a woman in a caftan, a couple of pictures of Jean Seberg visiting the Casbah in the '60s, and a glass table with a musical instrument and a scarf under it. That's it.

The Getty really dropped the ball on this one. You'll learn much more about Algiers just by watching the first six minutes of director Julien Duvivier's Pepe Le Moko, in which a narrator explains that the dusky Casbah is the home to Arabs, Berbers, black Africans, Turks, and kulughli (the offspring of Turkish solderis and Algerian women). Here are those first six minutes:

If you want to learn more about Algiers and the Casbah, watch Pepe Le Moko in its entirety, or read the great new 283-paged book which the Getty Center has produced in connection with its exhibit. (For some reason, Getty put a lot into the book, but not so much into the exhibit.) The book, like the exhibit, is called Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City Through Text and Image, and the editors are Zeynep Celik, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak. You can buy it from Amazon.com, for $37.19.

You can also buy my own book, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

Detroit Artist Guy Budziak Creates Woodcuts Inspired by Jean Gabin and Other Great Film Noir Notables

2009-09-28T11:01:00.000-07:00
I would like to take a brief moment to point you toward a great website:

http://www.filmnoirwoodcuts.com/

Artist Guy Budziak, in Detroit, makes and sells some really gorgeous woodcuts, inspired by great, key moments from film noir cinema's greatest masterpieces. In Guy's precision pieces, you'll see great performers like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Ryan, Marie Winsdor, Joan Blondell, Ruth Roman, Robert Mitchum, Elisha Cook, Jr., Tyrone Power, Veronica Lake, Dana Andrews, and many more.

One of Guy's selections happens to be a great woodcut of Jean Gabin, culled from a sequence in director Julien Duvivier's haunting 1937 proto-noir, Pepe Le Moko . Guy tells me that he is currently working on a second Jean Gabin woodcut, which will soon be on the way.

Here's Guy's Gabin/Pepe Le Moko woodcut:

Jean Gabin is not the only French star to appear in one of Guy's woodcuts: The French author Ginette Vincendeau used Guy's woodcut of Alain Delon, from the 1967 neo-noir Le Samourai, for the front jacket of her 2008 book Les Stars et le Star-Systeme en France. (This book was published in France, by L'Harmattan.)

I definitely recommend that you visit Guy Budziak's website www.filmnoirwoodcuts.com, where you will see samples of his great work.

Happy 75th Birthday, Brigitte Bardot!

2009-09-28T10:35:00.001-07:00

Here, Brigitte Bardot appears alongside Gabin in director Claude Autant-Lara's 1958 motion picture En cas de malheur.

Happy Birthday Brigitte Bardot, who wrote the foreword to my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUME TWO. (Go to www.jeangabinbook.com to find out how you can buy both volumes.)

Bardot appeared in forty-five feature films made between 1952 and 1973, including 1958's En cas de malheur, in which she co-starred, for the first and only time, with Jean Gabin. In Malheur, prostitute Bardot robs a store, and is defended by crusty old barrister Gabin, who is forty years her senior -- and of course, it's not long before the two of them are carrying on a tempestuous affair, with a tragic result. The literal title of the film means "In Case of Accident," but the film was released very briefly in the U.S., by Kinglsey Pictures, under the more lurid title, "Love is My Profession."

Brigitte Bardot has not appeared in a movie in thirty-six years, and today she continues to dedicate herself to the plight of cruelty against animals. To this end, she has created the Brigitte Bardot Foundation (it's the French equivalent of the American organization, P.E.T.A.), and you may read more about Ms. Bardot and her continuing great work by going to her website:

The ENGLISH-LANGUAGE HOMEPAGE FOR THE "FONDATION BRIGITTE BARDOT" is at:
http://www.fondationbrigittebardot.fr/site/homepage.php?Id=2

The FRENCH-LANGUAGE HOMEPAGE FOR THE "FONDATION BRIGITTE BARDOT" is at:
http://www.fondationbrigittebardot.fr

Happy 75th Birthday to Brigitte Bardot!

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Trailer for En cas de malheur, starring Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot
www.jeangabinbook.com

Jean Gabin Book: The 2009/2010 Expanded/Revised "Second Edition" is Now Here: Press Release

2009-09-06T13:00:00.000-07:00
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Here is Jean Gabin in the hypnotic 1939 film Le Recif de corail (The Coral Reefs, 1939), one of the films discussed in the book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, by Charles Zigman. While it was made during the same period when Gabin starred in such internationally recognized classics as Pepe Le Moko, La Bete humaine, Le Jour se leve, La Grande illusion, and Le Quai des brumes, Recif is completely unknown in America. In fact, because the film was considered to be "lost," it was unknown even in France, the country of its production, until 2004! The film actually had its French premiere in 2004, sixty years after it was produced.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

For More Information, contact: publisher@allenwoodpress.com

“Jean Gabin is one of the greatest actors who ever lived. He is, to me, the paradigm of the perfect actor. He’s still. He’s honest. He’s brave. He would never make anything up. He would never add any emotion to it… And he performs with such simplicity, that it can only be understood as artistic courage…”
David Mamet

ALLENWOOD PRESS ANNOUNCES AN OCTOBER 1, 2009 RELEASE DATE FOR
AWARD-WINNING FILM HISTORIAN/AUTHOR CHARLES ZIGMAN’S 2009/2010 “SECOND EDITION” OF WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN VOLUMES I & II

Awarded “Best Performing Arts Book” by Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2009 and “Book of the Year” for Best Performing Arts Book by Foreword Magazine in ‘08
Los Angeles, CA – Allenwood Press announces October 1, 2009 as the release date of the 2nd edition of a revised and expanded version of Film Historian/Author, Charles Zigman’s Award-Winning Two-Volume Set on the prolific film career of Actor Jean Gabin entitled, WORLD’S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN VOLS I AND II. Awarded “Best Performing Arts Book” by Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2009 and “Book of the Year” for Best Performing Arts Book by Foreword Magazine in ’08, the newly expanded and revised 2nd edition includes new photographs and twelve completely re-written chapters, with new information discovered via reader feedback from the First Edition.

The twelve film chapters which have been completely re-written from scratch for The Second Edition are for the films Coeurs joyeux (1933), La Bandera (1935), La Belle equipe (1935), Gueule d'amour (1937), Remorques (1941), Moontide (1942), Impostor (1944), L'Air de Paris (1954), Gas-Oil (1955), Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), Voici le temps des assassins (1957), and Le Chat (1971). Most of the other chapters feature important revisions, alterations, and deletions, as well.

Considered to be one of the greatest movie stars of all time by movie fans throughout the world, the legendary French actor Jean Gabin’s entire prolific film career is documented in the WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO. These are the very first filmography books on Jean Gabin and his ninety-five films in any language, not to mention the very first books ever written about Jean Gabin in the English-language. “For many people around the world,” Ian Birnie, film curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has said, “Jean Gabin is, and has always been, French cinema.”
The legendary actress Michele Morgan, who appeared with Gabin in some of his best known feature films, wrote the foreword to Volume One. Actress Brigitte Bardot penned an original foreword to Volume Two; Playwright/Director David Mamet has provided an “appreciation” in the same volume.

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES I AND II is for Jean Gabin newbies and completists alike: For the un-initiated, both books feature lengthy biography and introductory chapters which place Gabin and his famous big-screen persona into perspective; and for film buffs, Film Historian/Author Charles Zigman presents ninety-five separate chapters dedicated to Jean Gabin's ninety-five theatrical feature films. Each of the two volumes features over 100 rare archival photographs, never seen before in other published French-language books about Jean Gabin.

More than sixty motion pictures which have never been subtitled into English have been translated by native speakers and written about by Author Zigman in WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES I AND II, allowing English-speaking readers to feel, by reading about the films, that they’re actually ‘seeing’ them. Excerpts included from original U.S. and European newspaper reviews, written between the 1930’s and the 1970’s, demonstrate how prominent movie critics received Gabin's pictures when they were first released.
Throughout the world, Jean Gabin is considered to be film history’s consummate everyman, and he continues to be a huge cult figure in the United States. In 2002, week-long Jean Gabin festivals were presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’ and at the Walter Reade Theatres in New York to sold-out crowds. In September of 2008, Author Zigman, in connection with the release of the First Edition, presented a two-night Jean Gabin Screening Event and Book Signing at the American Cinematheque at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Gabin's popularity in the U.S. equaled that of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Bette Davis. Volume One, subtitled "Tragic Drifter," explores the period between 1930 to 1953, and covers the first forty-six of Gabin’s films, including the internationally renowned GRAND ILLUSION, as well as the 1937 gangster classic PEPE LE MOKO in which, as in other films made during this period, the actor reucrringly plays international movie history's most famous tragic drifter.

Volume Two, subtitled "Comeback/Patriarch," covers Films 47 through 95, which Gabin made between 1954 and 1976. During this period, instead of playing the tragic drifter, the star played a series of mega-cool gentleman-criminals and world-weary yet life-loving patriarchs. Gabin even turned out comedies during this period, films which have been previously unknown to English-speaking audiences.
Film Historian/Author Charles Zigman’s goal is to introduce as many people as possible to Gabin’s films and life in a fun, informative, comprehensive way. The 2nd edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES I AND II will be available October 1, 2009. The two volumes are sold separately.

Film Historian/Author Charles Zigman, a native of Los Angeles, has taught Film and Television at Augusta State University, Georgia. Zigman is a graduate of both UCLA’s undergraduate filmmaking program and Columbia University’s Graduate Department of Film in New York, where he co-wrote a screenplay with writing legend Terry Southern. Zigman has also contributed articles to NEW TIMES LOS ANGELES, CULT MOVIES MAGAZINE, THE HOLLYWOOD STOCK EXCHANGE, WORD.COM, and L.A. TRIBE.COM, not to mention several chapters to the 2001 book GIG: AMERICANS TALK ABOUT THEIR JOBS AT THE TIME OF THE MILLENNIUM (Crown Books). For the past ten years, he has traveled the world, researching and writing about all ninety-five films of Jean Gabin. He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. For more information, go to www.jeangabinbook.com and www.allenwoodpress.com.

Volume One: Tragic Drifter: ISBN: #978-0-9799722-0-1. ($39.95 U.S./£25.00 U.K./ €26.85 European Union.) Hardcover, 6 x 9, 576pps., 113 black and white photos, Pub. Date: October 1, 2009.

Volume Two: Comeback/Patriarch: ISBN: #978-0-9799722-1-8. ($39.95 U.S./£25.00 U.K./ €26.85 European Union.) Hardcover, 6 X 9, 532pps., 100 black and white photos, Pub. Date: October 1, 2009.

Distributed by: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.ca, Baker and Taylor, Barnes and Noble, Bertram’s, Blackwell Book Services, Coutts, Cypher Library Supplier, Gardner’s, Holt Jackson, Ingram, NACSCORP, Book Depository.

-END-

New 2009/2010 "Second Edition" of Jean Gabin Book, Revised and Expanded, Available Today, September 1, 2009

2009-09-01T18:40:00.001-07:00

JEAN GABIN: THE MOVIE STAR SO COOL, IT TAKES TWO BOOKS TO TELL HIS STORY!

September 1, 2009:

The All-New, Revised and Expanded Second Edition (aka, the "2009/2010 Edition") is Here.

More photographs! More chapters! More Gabin than ever before!

Thank you to everybody who has supported my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.

The book was released on July 20, 2008, to enormous successs.

Because of its success, the book's publisher, Allenwood Press, has commissioned me to complete the new "Second Edition," which is being released today, September 1, 2009, marking the book's one year anniversary.

This new, Second Edition of my two-volume book ("Version 2.0") l features updated information, scads of extra photographs, and a number of revisions -- in fact, twelve of the individual "film" chapters have been re-written completely from scratch. I have tried to make the book an interactive experience, in the sense that I provided an email address in the First Edition, and invited readers to send me their comments and criticisms; the new Second Edition is the product of the collaboration between myself and the readers.

Please stay tuned to this page, and please check out www.jeangabinbook.com, for more information on the Second Edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, by Charles Zigman.
Volume One covers Gabin's younger "matinee idol" years; Volume Two concentrates on the films he made when he was older, when he was French cinema's premiere patriarch.

Buy both Volumes now at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, or ask a Bookseller near you.

Also, if you have a chance, please make sure to give my book a "reader review" on Amazon.com or on Barnesandnoble.com (or on both).

And: Don't forget to go "beyond the book" at my blog site,
http://jeangabinbook.blogspot.com

PS: If you know somebody who likes classic movies, please tell them about my two-book set.

Thank you again.

Chuck Zigman, author (photograph: 9/1/09)
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN
VOLUMES ONE AND TWO
www.jeangabinbook.com

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK:
It's WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN by CHARLES ZIGMAN. VOLUME ONE (576pps.,ISBN #978-0-9799722-0-1) and VOLUME TWO (532pps.,ISBN # 978-0-9799722-1-8).

Volume One, which has been subtitled "Tragic Drifter," takes us through Gabin's first forty-six films, including the internationally renknowned Grand Illusion and Pepe Le Moko, a period spanning the years 1930 to 1953, during which time he played movie history's most famous tragic drifter. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gabin's popularity in the U.S. even eclipsed that of Bogart, James Cagney, and Bette Davis. (Ever heard anybody say, "Come with me to the Casbah. We will make ze beautiful muzeek togezaire?" It was famously attributed to the character Jean Gabin portrayed in the 1937 gangster classic Pepe Le Moko and Charles Boyer portrayed in the subsequent English-langugae remake, Algiers, made one year later, even though neither Gabin nor Boyer eever actually uttered those words.) In fact Gabin and Boyer's "Pepe" character even inspired Warner Bros. to create its legendary cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, whose looks and voice were modeled on the actors.)

Volume Two, covers Films 47 through 95, which Gabin made between 1954 and 1976. During this period of his career, instead of playing the tragic drifter, he played a series of mega-cool gentleman-criminals, and world-weary (yet life-loving) patriarchs. He'll even turn out some hilarious comedies during this period, which are criminally unknown in the U.S., and this Volume has been subtitled, "Comeback/Patriarch."

The tone of the book is "fun and readable," the goal of the project being, to introduce as many people as I can to the films of Gabin; to that end, it's loaded with rare photographs, many of which have never appeared even in previously published French-language books about Gabin.

It's a book for Jean Gabin 'newbies' and 'completists' both: For the uninitiated, there are some biography and 'intro' chapters, which place Gabin, and his famous big-screen persona into perspective. For the completists, I (the author) have unpacked every single one of Jean Gabin's ninety-five theatrical feature films, even the more than fifty pictures which have never been subtitled into English before, so that you can feel, by reading the chapters, that you're actually seeing the films. Excerpts from newspapers written back in the day, both in the U.S. and in Europe, will show you how prominent movie critics received Gabin's pictures the day they were first released, in the 1930s through the 1970s.

Order Now:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=World%27s+Coolest+Movie+Star%2C+Zigman

Richard Schickel: Time Magazine Critic Prefers Jean Gabin to Spencer Tracy (Yes!) and Says Goodbye to LACMA's Film Program

2009-08-05T09:15:00.000-07:00

In October 2009, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will shutter its 37-year film program, which included a popular twelve-film 2002 tribute to Jean Gabin.

by Charles Zigman, August 5, 2009.

On July 28, 2009, Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, announced that his museum's prestigous Friday and Saturday night film screenings, a Los Angeles mainstay for more than thirty-seven years, will be shut down, in October, due to lack of financing and because it's been bleeding money: The program has lost, according to Govan, more than $1 million over the last ten years. (During a bad economy, as this author has discovered elsewhere, the arts -- especially film -- is the first thing to go.)

It's tragic, because LACMA is one of the few places left in the entire country where one can regularly go to see great old movies, projected in a theater, and the films programmed by former curator Ian Birnie were often brilliant and neglected. (How long before L.A.'s American Cinematheque and N.Y.'s Film Forum are boarded up?)

On August 1, Time Magazine's illustrious film critic Richard Schickel wrote an Opinion piece for the L.A. Times, entitled, "LACMA's Cruelest Cut," in which he decried LACMA's savage cut. In the same piece, he extolled some of the great movies and filmmakers he had witnessed at LACMA's Leo S. Bing Theater over the last many years.

Especially, in his Times piece, Schickel celebrated the great French actor Jean Gabin, the subject of this author's two-volume biography/filmography WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, which was released on July 20, 2008 (www.jeangabinbook.com). The all-new, expanded/revised version of the book will be released on September 1, 2009.

In his L.A. Times piece, Schickel wrote:

"[At LACMA], you could have witnessed the great Jean Gabin (weary, taciturn and the kind of actor Spencer Tracy aimed to be but never quite became) in Touchez pas au Grisbi, experiencing a screen portrayal at its highest and most subtle level."

Above, Schickel has referenced the fact that American journalists have always called Jean Gabin "the French Spencer Tracy," but that, in his opinion, Gabin is superior to Tracy. (This author loves both actors, but has to agree with Schickel.)

LACMA's 2002 twelve-film tribute series to Jean Gabin was, principally, what lit the fire under me to write my book about Gabin. I had seen a number of his films before, but LACMA screened some of the actor's films which had rarely been screened in Los Angeles, in beautiful 35 millimeter prints, and I couldn't wait to write about them.

And of course, while I'm devastated to see LACMA's film series go, and while I try to stay away from editorializing on this blogsite (as well as in my life), I can also see the other side of the picture as well, in the sense that, while LACMA's Friday and Saturday night film presentations are one of my favorite things about L.A., I'm also hopelessly pragmatic; I understand that the series had lost more than $1 million over the last ten years, because of underattendance. (Usually, only 250 out of the theater's 600 seats are sold.) So while I feel horribly that LACMA's film series has to be axed, I have to say that I also agree with director Govan. Some people, on line, are "making petitions" in the hopes of restoring LACMA's film program, but if the petitioners are really interested, what they should really do is send LACMA some money, instead of some signatures. I try not to add any vitriol to this blog site, but it always infuriates me, to no end, when groovy artsy-craftsy people want something done, but they always think it should come out of somebody else's pocket, and I am guilty of this grievous sin sometimes, too. If you want LACMA to continue its series, as I do, you should be thinking, as I am thinking right now, about writing LACMA a check, because the arts don't run themselves, especially during a Recession. Just like anything else worth doing, you have to fight for it, and the way we fight, here in America, is with green paper with pictures of presidents on it, and not by signing a passive-agressive petition. And, yes, I am completely serious about this.

What I'm trying to say, most ineffectively, is that I hope LACMA can restore its Friday and Saturday night film presentations, but if it can't, it can't. Money talks. I thank the Museum for the years of pleasure its film screenings have given me and others in L.A.

And I thank Richard Schickel for pointing out, correctly, in his Los Angeles Times piece, that Jean Gabin is "the real Spencer Tracy!"

Rene Dary and Jean Gabin starred in Touchez pas au grisbi, which was screened at LACMA, in 2002, as part of the Museum's Gabin Film Festival.

The all-new 2009 edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, will be available on September 1, 2009. Check this blogsite for updates!

The Michael Jackson/Jean Gabin Connection

2009-07-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

Josephine Baker and Jean Gabin in the classic 1934 film, Zouzou.
??!!

There's not really any connection between Michael Jackson and Jean Gabin, but Rolling Stone Magazine has just reported that, whenever Jackson met with doctors in order to attain his prescriptions (Demerol, Clonazepan, etc.), he would do so under something like nineteen different aliases. Most of these names are made-up, although Jackson would sometimes obtain medicine under the monicker, Josephine Baker!

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/07/29/investigators-seek-medical-records-for-jacksons-aliases/

Of course, the great African-American entertainer, Josephine Baker, lived in France in the 1920s and 1930s, and it is there that she starred in a number of great feature films, one of which, Zouzou, co-starred her with Jean Gabin. It's one of the most extraordinary French features of the early 1930s.

Zouzou is available on DVD from Amazon.com

Demerol and Clonazepam are available from your doctor.

World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes One and Two, by Charles Zigman -- featuring a chapter about Josephine Baker and Jean Gabin in Zouzou -- is also available from Amazon.com.

Michele Morgan, 89, Jean Gabin's Greatest Co-Star, wins Legion of Honor Award in Paris!

2009-07-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

Some great news!

This past week, on July 14, the great and luminiscent French actress Michele Morgan, who is 89 years old, was one of six recipients of the Legion of Honor award in France, a prize which she shares with actress Bernadette Lafont, directors Jerome Deschamps and Macha Makeieff, former Minister of Justice Albin Chalandion, and academician Jean-Marie Rouart.

Morgan, for Anglophone movie fans who might not familiar with her, is one of France's leading movie stars of the Golden Age, as popular in her native country as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis are in the United States.

Of course, she is probably also Jean Gabin's greatest co-star; in fact, in director Michele Carne's 1938 classic of French Poetic Realism, Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows), Gabin tells Morgan, "T'as de beaux yeux, tu sais" (translation: "You have the most beautiful eyes, you know"). (In terms of its paramount importance, this line of dialogue is right up there with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," from Gone with the Wind, where French film scholars and film fans are concerned.) In real-life, Gabin and Morgan were an item for awhile, in the late '30s and early '40s, as well.

Very literally, this is the most famous line in the history of French cinema:
"T'as de beaux yeux, tu sais." (It's not 'what' Gabin says swooningly to Morgan, but how he says it.)

Right before she co-starred with Gabin in 1939's Le Quai des brumes, Morgan, who was then only 17, first appeared alongside the actor in 1938's Le Recif de corail (The Coral Reef), and she and Gabin also co-starred together in 1941's Remorques (Tugboats/Misty Wharves) and 1952's La Minute de verite (The Moment of Truth). Additionally, Gabin and Morgan appeared separately in director Sacha Guitry's undernourished 1952 epic, Napoleon,which might be the only 'bad' film associated with either actor.

Michele Morgan, who was born Simone Roussel on February 29, 1920 (a leap year), first came to the attention of the French moviegoing public with her starring role in director Marc Allegret's 1937 Gribouille, a sort of pre-cursor to Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, and she appeared in more than seventy movies and television roles up until the time she retired from the screen, in 1999. During the Second World War, when Germany invaded France, many French film notables, including both Gabin and Morgan, temporarily moved to Hollywood where they appeared in a number of American-made English-language films.

Morgan has been married three times -- to the American actor William Marshall, to the French actor Henri Vidal, and to the director Gerard Oury, and her son by William Marshall, Mike Marshall, who passed away in 2005, was a film actor as well.

Today, retired from performing, the multifaceted Michele Morgan continues to be a painter of great repute, with occasional gallery exhibitions in France. Here she is on June 11, 2008, still beautiful and engaging at the age of 88:

And of course, Morgan has also contributed an original foreword to my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN (www.jeangabinbook.com). The First Edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR was released on July 20, 2008, and the all-new revised/updated/expanded Second Edition should be released around September 1, 2009. Keep your eyes on this blogsite for more details as they become available.

Congratulations to Michele Morgan on her great honor!

Happy Bastille Day from Jean Gabin Book.com!

2009-07-14T09:12:00.000-07:00
Happy Bastille Day from
www.jeangabinbook.com.

Today is July 14th. It's the perfect day to celebrate a great French holiday, Bastille Day... and it's also a perfect day to buy a copy of a book about a great French movie star:
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, by Charles Zigman

From Wikipedia:

Bastille Day is the French national holiday, celebrated on 14 July each year. In France, it is called Fête Nationale ("National Celebration") in official parlance, or more commonly le quatorze juillet ("14 July"). It commemorates the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789; the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille fortress-prison was seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern nation, and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the First Republic, during the French Revolution.

Festivities are held on the morning of 14 July, on the Champs-Élysées avenue in Paris in front of the President of the Republic.

The parade opens with many cadets from the École Polytechnique, Saint-Cyr, École Navale, and so forth, then other infantry troops, then motorised troops; aviation of the Patrouille de France flies above. In recent times, it has become customary to invite units from France's allies to the parade; in 2004 during the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, British troops (the band of the Royal Marines, the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment, Grenadier Guards and King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery) led the Bastille Day parade in Paris for the first time, with the Red Arrows flying overhead.[1]

Traditionally, the students of the École Polytechnique set up some form of joke.[citation needed]

The president used to give an interview to members of the press, discussing the situation of the country, recent events and projects for the future. Nicolas Sarkozy, elected president in 2007, has chosen not to give it. The President also holds a garden party at the Palais de l'Elysée.

Article 17 of the Constitution of France gives the President the authority to pardon offenders, and since 1991 the President has pardoned many petty offenders (mainly traffic offences) on 14 July. In 2007, President Sarkozy declined to continue the practice[2].

www.jeangabinbook.com

Jean Gabin in GRAND ILLUSION: Watch It Right Here/Right Now

2009-07-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hello:

I'm Chuck Zigman, author of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.

I'm hard at work on the all-new, expanded/revised 2009 edition of my book, which should be available around September 1st (keep checking back at this blogsite for the exact date), and this is why I haven't been posting blog entries regularly.

In the meantime, how would you like to watch a Jean Gabin movie right now?

Here you go:

Director Jean Renoir's 1937 classic, La Grande illusion, is perhaps the best known of all of Gabin's ninety-five feature films and, of course, it's considered to be one of the Top 100 Movies of All Time by almost every serious film critic on earth.

Grand Illusion is, primarily, the story of three World War One fighter pilots -- an aristocrat (Pierre Fresnay), a member of the working-class (Jean Gabin), and an 'eternally wandering Jew' who fits in with neither of those two classes (Marcel Dalio) -- and how their friendship will overcome their differences, especially when they are captured and placed in various POW camps. Their 'foil,' who turns out to be good-hearted, is the German colonel Von Rauffenstein, who's played by Eric von Stroheim (his is an iconic role; even if you've never seen Grand Illusion, you've probably, at some point in your life, seen an image of Stroheim from this film -- bald-headed, monocle, standing collar, etc.).

I hope you enjoy Grand Illusion. The film has been uploaded in 15 chapters, but don't worry, you don't have to do anything; at the end of each chapter, the film will automatically proceed to the following chapter.

To read more about Jean Gabin and Grand Illusion, buy a copy of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO. The New/Expanded/Revised 2009 Edition should be available on September 1, 2009.

Thank you! Hope you're having a nice summer.

Charles Zigman,
author,
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.
www.jeangabinbook.com
http://chuckzigmanoverdrive.blogspot.com

Happy Independence Day from www.JeanGabinBook.com!

2009-07-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Independence Day from www.jeangabinbook.com

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, winner of the Independent Publishers Association Book of the Year (Performing Arts category) is available now on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

All-New Expanded/Revised "2009 Edition" of Jean Gabin Books: Coming Soon

2009-07-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

Hi, Everybody!

Thank you to everybody who has supported my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO. My goal is that the great French movie icon should be as recognized here in the U.S. as he's always been throughout the rest of the world, and I hope that I am helping that to happen, one copy at a time.

Since the book's initial publication one year ago, in July 2008, I hosted a sold-out, two-night Gabin-related event at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, and the book has even won two prominent book awards just over the last week: WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR was the bronze medal winner as Performing Arts Book of the Year in both the Independent Publishing (IP)Book Awards and the ForeWord Magazine Book Awards. (ForeWord Magazine is the trade publication of 35,000 independent librarians nationwide.) A few days ago, I posted a blog about these two awards. The book has also received some glowing critical reviews.

Anyway, I have decided to make WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR an 'interactive' experience, in the sense that I posted my email address in the book (author@jeangabinbook.com), and I invited readers to share their thoughts. I have received a lot of feedback about the book, which I have decided to incorporate into an all-new Second Edition (aka, 'the First 2009 Edition' or 'Version 2.0'), which will be released sometime in August. Since there is only one book about Jean Gabin in English, and since I've spent an entire decade working on the two volumes, my goal is to make it the best, and most correct/accurate book I can, since this is really the best way to honor the acting legend.

To that end, the upcoming new, Second Edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR will feature more chapters, more photographs, and more information about Gabin which I didn't cover in the first edition -- mostly because I didn't know about it when the first edition went to press. (Did you know that Gabin performed on a 90-minute radio show in France, in 1960, with the musician Leo Ferre? I didn't know it either, but information about this historic broadcast has now been added into the book). Additionally, for the new, Second Edition, I have completely re-written, from scratch, 15 of the books 95 filmography chapters, and I have added extra information to many other chapters, as well. Now, in 2009, there are more Gabin DVDs available with English subtitles than there were a year ago, so I have even added information into the book about where you can get them.

I will let you know when the Second Edition is available. (Note: The version which is currently available on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com is only the First Edition.)

So, thank you to everybody who has read WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR. The Second Edition is coming soon, and I promise it will be bigger, better, and "Frencher" than ever.

Charles Zigman,
www.jeangabinbook.com

PS: Feel free to bookmark my all-new blogsite, where I'll talk about my other areas of interest, outside of Jean Gabin. I just put it up yesterday:
http://chuckzigmanoverdrive.blogspot.net

Jean Gabin Book, Wins Two Book Awards in 2009

2009-06-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Some good news this month, as my book, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, won two book awards, taking home the bronze award in both competitions:

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR is the winner of the 2009 Independent Publishing (IP) Book Awards (Bronze), in the category of Performing Arts. (The First Place/Gold winner was Quincy Jones's autobiography, The Complete Quincy Jones and the Second Place/Silver winner was Inside Beethoven's Quartets, from Harvard University Press.) My book tied for third place (bronze) with Robert Osborne's 80 Years of Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards and Historic Photos of Broadway by Leonard Jacobs.

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR is also the winner of ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Awards (Bronze), in the category of Performing Arts and Drama. (The First Place/Gold winner was What We Do: Working in the Theater, from Infinity Press, and the Second Place/Silver Winner was the new English translation of Book of Dreams, by Federico Fellini, from Rizzoli Press.)

The newly revised/updated 2009 Edition of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN ("Version 2.0"), from Allenwood Press, will be available to purchase later this summer. Check back to this blogsite for more details.

For more information about WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, please email or phone Allenwood Press: publisher@allenwoodpress.com or (323)297-2130.

Jean Gabin: Plumber?

2009-06-26T10:47:00.001-07:00

I was having lunch yesterday at a great L.A. diner, the Good Neighbor Restaurant on Cahuenga Blvd., when I happened to notice this van in the parking lot.

Apparently, Jean Gabin -- besides being THE WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR (per the title of my book) -- is now, also, a plumber!

The all-new Second Edition (aka, 'The First 2009 Edition') of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR will be available later this summer. Keep your eyes on this blogsite for more information.

Chuck Zigman,
Author,
World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes One and Two.
www.jeangabinbook.com

Happy 105th Birthday, Jean Gabin!

2009-05-17T14:53:00.000-07:00
Today is Sunday, May 17th, 2009.

Happy 105th Birthday to Jean Gabin.

Jean Gabin, of course, passed on in 1976, at the age of 72, but he will continually be remembered, because he is THE WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR. Audiences who lined up last week at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, to see Gabin in two films directed by Julien Duvivier, 1935's "La Bandera" and 1936's "La Belle equipe," already know that.

World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Volumes One and Two, the first English-language book about Gabin, is available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com, or ask a bookseller near you.

Swine Flu Completely Unrelated to "World's Coolest Movie Star" Jean Gabin

2009-04-28T06:29:00.000-07:00

I was trying to find a connection between the current Swine Flu hysteria and Jean Gabin, and there isn't one -- although this photo has recently surfaced!

www.jeangabinbook.com

22-Film Julien Duvivier Tribute at MoMa (NYC), May 2009, Includes Four Jean Gabin Movies, Including Ultra-Rarities!

2009-04-10T22:19:00.000-07:00

Harry Nilsson was correct when he sang, "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City," because in May 2009, NYC will definitively be the place to be: The Museum of Modern Art will be honoring the legendary French director Julien Duvivier, with a twenty-two film/month-long tribute. A great majority of the films being screened have never been shown in the US (they are North American premieres), and a great many of them will feature English subtitles for the very first time.

Duvivier, of course, directed seven films starring his good friend Jean Gabin, and four of them will be screened at MoMa's festival -- not just the ultra-rare La Belle equipe (1936), but also Pepe Le Moko (1937), La Bandera (1935), and Voici le temps des assassins (1956). While Gabin is mostly known in the United States for his collaborations with Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne, another of his great collaborators was Julien Duvivier, a great visual stylist who often peppered his films with some pretty edgy/trippy/hypnotic proto-David Lynch visual moments. (La Belle equipe and Voici le temps des assassins have been out of circulation in America for decades, and neither film has ever been shown on t.v., or on home video.)

The following, is the Museum of Modern Art's press release, which features the entire schedule. Many of the films will be repeated twice, to give cineastes ample opportunity to screen them. The Jean Gabin titles are in bold type.

_________________________________________
Exhibition Features Four Films Starring the Legendary Actor Jean Gabin, Including the Celebrated Pépé le Moko (1937)

Composer Stephen Sondheim Will Introduce Un Carnet de bal (1937) on May 14
Julien Duvivier

May 1 – 28, 2009
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
Hours: Films are screened Wednesday-Monday. For screening schedules, please visit www.moma.org.

New York, April 7, 2009
The widely varied and influential career of French director and screenwriter Julien Duvivier (1896-1967) is rediscovered in "Julien Duvivier," a month-long, 22-film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, from May 1 through 28, 2009. Working consistently for four decades, both in Europe and Hollywood, in a darkly poetic realist style, Duvivier made popular melodramas, thrillers, religious epics, comedies, wartime propaganda, musicals, and literary adaptations of novels by Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Irène Némirovsky, and Georges Simenon. This exhibition features the New York premieres of four films that have either been recently restored or are shown in Duvivier’s preferred versions, as well as new translations of 14 films.

On May 14, at 8:00 p.m., the composer Stephen Sondheim will introduce Duvivier’s classic sketch film Un Carnet de bal (1937), which he once intended to adapt as a Broadway musical.

The Julien Duvivier retrospective is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Lenny Borger, film historian and translator.

Jean Renoir once proclaimed, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Duvivier above the entrance… This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet.” Duvivier, who was also championed by other estimable filmmakers and writers, including Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Graham Greene, Elaine May, Agnès Varda, and Orson Welles, is largely known for his collaborations with the great actor Jean Gabin in the 1930s. This exhibition features four of these classics of French cinema: the recently restored La Bandera (1935); the New York premiere of Duvivier’s preferred, darker ending to La Belle Équipe (1936); Pépé le Moko (1937); and Voici le temps des assassins (1956).

The exhibition’s rare screenings include Duvivier’s adaptation of the Zola novel Au Bonheur des dames (1930), his adaptation of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret story A Man’s Neck (1933), the enchanting La Fête à Henriette (1952), and the silent and sound versions of Poil de carotte (1925 and 1932), a heartbreaking chronicle of childhood. The 1932 sound version of Poil de carotte—Duvivier’s favorite among his films—will be the opening night feature on Friday, May 1, at 7:00 p.m., introduced by co-curator Lenny Borger.

Also featured in the exhibition are the New York premieres of four films: the delightful and revelatory experimental comedy Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (1932); the newly restored La Bandera (1935); La Belle Equipe (1936), with Duvivier’s preferred tragic ending; and the wartime propaganda film Untel Père et fils (Heart of a Nation) (1943) in its longer, French theatrical version. “Among the French directors of the classic period,” Claude Chabrol recently observed, “Julien Duvivier is my favorite, with Jean Renoir. He was an auteur who didn’t declare himself one.”

The exhibition is made possible, in part, by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York.

Press Contacts: Meg Blackburn, (212) 708-9757, meg_blackburn@moma.org
Margaret Doyle, (212) 408-6400, margaret_doyle@moma.org

For downloadable images, please visit www.moma.org/press.
No. 28

Film Admission: $10 adults; $8 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $6 full-time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only.) The price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket when a film ticket stub is presented at the Lobby Information Desk within 30 days of the date on the stub (does not apply during Target Free Friday Nights, 4:00–8:00 p.m.). Admission is free for Museum members and for Museum ticketholders.
The public may call (212) 708-9400 for detailed Museum information. Visit us at www.moma.org

SCREENING SCHEDULE
Julien Duvivier

All films are directed by Julien Duvivier and in French, with English subtitles, except The Great Waltz and Anna Karenina (both in English), and The Little World of Don Camillo (in Italian, with English subtitles).

Friday, May 1
7:00 Poil de carotte. 1932. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, based on the story by Jules Renard. With Harry Baur, Robert Lynen, Catherine Fonteney.
With its justifiably famous “wedding” scene of Poil de carotte to a little country girl, this astonishingly sophisticated early sound film is a visual poem of innocence and grace that would inspire René Clément’s Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) twenty years later. “In a rare example of a remake surpassing its memorable original,” Lenny Borger notes, “Duvivier gave definitive form to this classic chronicle of childhood. Baur plays the father with all his subtle authority and young Lynen cuts deep to the desperate pathos of lonely Poil de Carotte. A film of great tenderness, and lyricism, with a final reconciliation scene between Baur and Lynen to force a sob from the stoniest breast.” 91 min.
Introduced by co-curator Lenny Borger

Saturday, May 2
1:30 Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! 1932. France/Germany. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Rolf E. Vanloo. With Josette Day, Wolfgang Klein, Germaine Aussey.
One of the exhibition’s major rediscoveries, Allo Berlin? reveals a lighter, more experimental side of Duvivier, with a charming sentimentality and hilarious visual and verbal gags to rival those of fellow French filmmaker René Clair. Young switchboard operators in Paris and Berlin meet cute by flirting across telephone lines, national borders, and romance languages in this celebration of continental cosmopolitanism between the wars. 89 min.

5:00 La Tête d’un homme (A Man’s Neck). 1933. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Pierre Calmann, Louis Delaprée, Duvivier, based on the novel by Georges Simenon. With Harry Baur, Valery Inkizhinov, Gaston Jacquet.
“One of the first great screen incarnations of Georges Simenon’s famous sleuth, Inspector Maigret. Only months after Jean Renoir filmed La Nuit de carrefour with his actor brother Pierre, Duvivier passed the pipe to Harry Baur, and the results were just as broodingly electric. Maigret roams crowded Montparnasse cafés and dingy tenements as he plays cat and mouse with a nihilistic, Dostoevskian killer (hauntingly played by Russian émigré actor Valery Inkizhinov). Both a classic film noir and a seminal police procedural” (Borger). 98 min.

8:00 Panique. 1946. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Charles Spaak, based on the novel Les Fiançailles de Monsieur Hire by Georges Simenon. With Michel Simon, Viviane Romance, Max Dalban.
Duvivier’s late masterpiece, a coruscating vision of evil, foreshadows Hitchcock in its tensions and recalls Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Raven and Fritz Lang’s Fury in its themes of small town hysteria and the framing of an innocent man. Michel Simon gives a virtuoso performance as Monsieur Hire, George Simenon’s lonely, voyeuristic bachelor, who falls for a gangster’s seductive moll and is set up for the murder of an old woman. 96 min.

Sunday, May 3
2:30 Poil de carotte. 1925. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, based on the story by Jules Renard. With André Heuzé, Henry Krauss, Charlotte Barbier-Krauss.
Duvivier’s breakthrough film is a heartbreaking, Dickensian story of a country boy, derisively nicknamed “Carrot Top,” who is physically and emotionally abused by his mother and neglected by his father. Recalling two other brilliant, silent-era portraits of childhood suffering—his mentor André Antoine’s Le Coupable (1917) and Jacques Feyder’s Visages d’enfants (1925)— Duvivier imbues his melodrama with a psychological depth, a sensitivity to peasant customs and pastoral light, and a harsh naturalism that transforms the Alpine landscape into a metaphor for loneliness and cruelty. Silent; piano accompaniment. Approx. 108 min.

5:30 Poil de carotte. 1932. (See Friday, May 1, 7:00.)

Monday, May 4
4:30 Poil de carotte. 1925. (See Sunday, May 3, 2:30.)

8:00 Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! 1932. (See Saturday, May 2, 1:30.)

Wednesday, May 6
4:30 La Tête d’un homme (A Man’s Neck). 1933. (See Saturday, May 2, 5:00.)

Thursday, May 7
4:30 La Belle Équipe (They Were Five). 1936. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Charles Spaak. With Jean Gabin, Charles Vanel, Viviane Romance.
Made during the gathering storms of war, economic collapse, and social unrest—and in the same radical cinematic year as Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey and Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker et al.’s La Vie est à Nous—La Belle Équipe has long been considered a celebration of Popular Front ideals of working-class solidarity and universal brotherhood. But the director’s preferred tragic ending, with Viviane Romance’s sexual temptations spelling doom for Jean Gabin and Charles Vanel—shown here in the U.S. for the first time—renders this one of Duvivier’s bleakest masterpieces. Five penniless workers win the lottery and are able to realize their dream of opening a guinguette (café-restaurant and pleasure garden) on the banks of the Marne. Duvivier uses beautifully fluid camerawork, pastoral settings, and popular song to mark their freedom from the crushing defeat of poverty, then sabotages their noble enterprise through a crime of passion. 101 min.

Friday, May 8
4:30 La Bandera. 1935. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Charles Spaak. With Jean Gabin, Annabella, Robert Le Vigan.
Recently restored by the Archives Françaises du Film, Duvivier’s sensuous and brooding Foreign Legion melodrama was a commercial success and made Jean Gabin a star, helping to forge his romantic image, solidified in Pépé le Moko, as the doomed existential antihero haunted by a criminal past and driven toward death. Filmed in Spain and Morocco on the eve of civil war—the original theatrical release was dedicated to “Colonel Franco”—La Bandera is an Orientalist fantasy
infused with the quality of reportage, most notably in the tense chase sequence through the mean streets of Barcelona, about which Alistair Cooke observed, “It looks like an exquisite newsreel taken away and baked brown to give you the feel of the air.” 100 min.

Saturday, May 9
1:30 David Golder. 1930. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, based on the novel by Irène Némirovsky. With Harry Baur, Jackie Monnier, Paule Andral.
Duvivier’s first sound film catapulted him to world renown. In this operatic adaptation of the controversial novel by Irène Némirovsky (the recently rediscovered author of Suite Française), Harry Baur gives a wrenching performance as an immigrant Jewish tycoon who makes money the ruthless and vengeful way, but ends up being bitterly betrayed by his scheming wife and daughter. Exposing man’s rank instincts for hatred, duplicity, and greed, Duvivier shows an unflinching pessimism that would also distinguish later films like La Fin du jour (1939) and Panique (1947). The Nazi murders of Némirovsky and Baur—she in Auschwitz in 1942, and he by the Gestapo in Paris a year later—deepen the film’s tragic dimensions. 86 min.

5:00 Le Tourbillon de Paris (The Whirlwind of Paris). 1927. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, based on the novel La Sarrazine by Germaine Acremant. With Lil Dagover, Léon Bary, Gaston Jacquet.
Dagover, a star of German Expressionist cinema, plays an opera singer who becomes restless in her marriage to an older Scottish lord, and longs to return to the limelight of the Parisian stage. The film’s psychological realism is heightened by Duvivier’s clever use of double exposure to convey the tension between inner thought and outward appearance. Silent; with piano accompaniment. Approx. 108 min.

8:00 La Belle Équipe (They Were Five). 1936. (See Thursday, May 7, 4:30.)

Sunday, May 10
5:00 La Bandera. 1935. (See Friday, May 8, 4:30.)

Monday, May 11
8:00 La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin. 1929. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Thérèse de Lisieux. With Simone Bourday, André Marnay.
“The most authentic of Duvivier’s religious films, this is a stark and striking biographical account of the late nineteenth-century Carmelite nun who died at age 24 and was canonized. Simone Bourday has genuine adolescent fervor as Theresa and André Marnay is pathetically fine as her father. The sequence of the taking of the veil has extraordinary documentary force. The same material inspired Alain Cavalier’s 1986 masterpiece Thérèse” (Borger). Silent; piano accompaniment. Approx. 113 min.

Wednesday, May 13
4:30 David Golder. 1930. (See Saturday, May 9, 1:30.)

8:00 Au bonheur des dames. 1930. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Noël Renard, based on the novel by Émile Zola. With Dita Parlo, Pierre de Guingand, Armand Bour.
Duvivier’s last silent film is a modern retelling of Zola’s panoramic chronicle of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian society, centering on a small fabric shop struggling to survive in the shadow of a luxury department store. With expressionist shades of Erich von Stroheim and G.W. Pabst (Duvivier worked for a time in the German film industry), Au bonheur captures the rhythms of urban life—and the pleasures of bourgeois consumer culture, with its obsessions with fashion and image—while also creating a stinging portrait of capitalist ruthlessness, class tensions, and sexual competition. Silent; piano accompaniment. Approx. 85 min.

Thursday, May 14
4:30 La Fin du jour (The End of the Day). 1938. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Charles Spaak. With Victor Francen, Michael Simon, Louis Jouvet.
One of French cinema’s most poignant, and caustic, portraits of the world of theater. Duvivier, who got his start as a (failed) actor on the French stage in the 1910s, collaborated with his longtime screenwriting partner Charles Spaak on this story of an old-age home for destitute, forgotten actors who relive past triumphs and defeats even as they fade into obsolescence. Giving credence to Jean-Luc Godard’s claim that in the theater there is life, and in life, theater, Duvivier masterfully contrasts the illusory world on stage with the cold reality of life—and death—off it. In keeping with the film’s elegiac tone, Simon, Jouvet, Francen and other great French actors performing at the peak of their careers, show astonishing subtlety, intelligence, and pathos. 100 min.

8:00 Un Carnet de bal (The Dance Card). 1937. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Henri Jeanson, Yves Mirande, Jean Sarment, Pierre Wolff, Bernard Zimmer. With Françoise Rosay, Harry Baur, Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Fernandel, Pierre Blanchar, Pierre Richard-Willm.
In the first and greatest of all Duvivier’s portmanteau films, a rich widow seeks to discover the fates of the suitors she danced with as a young woman at her first ball. As Graham Greene marveled in his 1937 review, the mood of melancholy nostalgia gives way to farce, tragedy, menace, and then pure annihilating misery as she reunites with a village mayor, a gangster, a priest, the mother of a suicide, and an epileptic abortionist: “The padded and opulent emotions wither before the evil detail: the camera shoots at a slant so that the [abortionist’s] dingy flat rears like a sinking ship….Genuine poverty is in Duvivier’s Marseilles flat—the tin surgical basin, the antiseptic soap, the mechanical illegality and the complete degradation.” 130 min.
Introduced by composer Stephen Sondheim

Friday, May 15
4:30 Pot-Bouille. 1957. France/Italy. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Léo Joannon, Henri Jeanson. With Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux, Dany Carrel, Anouk Aimée.
“A scintillating satire of the discrete charms of the French bourgeoisie under the Second Empire. Returning nearly 30 years later to Zola for his inspiration, Duvivier (again abetted by screenwriter Henri Jeanson) fashions a sardonic comedy that often whirs like a Feydeau farce. The sterling cast is headed by Gérard Philippe as a young provincial on the make in Paris, and Danielle Darrieux as the owner of the drapery shop where he finds employment. Arguably Duvivier’s last major artistic success” (Borger). 115 min.

8:00 La Fin du jour (The End of the Day). 1938. (See Thursday, May 14, 4:30.)

Sunday, May 16
1:30 Pépé le Moko. 1937. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Henri La Barthe, Duvivier. With Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Marcel Dalio.
A milestone on the path from Scarface to Casablanca, The Third Man, and The Battle of Algiers, Duvivier’s most influential film stars Jean Gabin as a suave Parisian jewel thief who eludes capture by taking refuge in the Casbah, the shadowy, mysterious, and labyrinthine quarter of Algiers transformed into the exotic, and erotic, Arabian nights of our colonialist imagination. Graham Greene rhapsodized, “I cannot remember [a picture] which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level,” and French auteurist André Bazin observed, “With Gabin…death is, after all, at the end of the adventure, implacably awaiting its appointment. The fate of Gabin is precisely to be duped by life.” 94 min.5:00 Au bonheur des dames. 1930. (See Wednesday, May 13, 8:00.)

8:00 Pot-Bouille. 1957. (See Friday, May 15, 4:30.)

Sunday, May 17
2:30 The Great Waltz. 1938. USA. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter Reisch. With Luise Rainer, Fernand Gravet, Miliza Korjus.
Duvivier made his Hollywood debut with this opulent MGM musical—said to be a favorite of Stalin’s!—about the romantic, early years of composer Johan Strauss, written by the émigrés Gottfried Reinhardt and Samuel Hoffenstein and gorgeously photographed by the Oscar-winning Joseph Ruttenberg. Attempting to capture the lilting rhythms and charms of Strauss’s waltzes and operas (set here to lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and performed by the Viennese-born soprano diva Miliza Korjus), Duvivier moved from lavish set piece to lavish set piece, in the café, the garden, the palace, and the opera house—leading one critic to call the film “a symphony in soft focus”—before Josef von Sternberg stepped in to direct the wonderfully kitschy final sequence, the carriage ride through the Viennese woods when Strauss was inspired by birdsong to write The Blue Danube. 103 min.

5:30 Anna Karenina. 1948. Great Britain. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Jean Anouilh, Duvivier, Guy Morgan. With Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson, Kieron Moore.
“The multiplicity of pronunciations of ‘Karenina’ by various people is a trifle distracting,” a Variety reviewer observed in 1948, in one of many critical drubbings of the film. And yet—and yet—Duvivier’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy, one of British producer Alexander Korda’s most lavish postwar productions (and biggest flops), has its irresistible pleasures: the great Henri Alekan’s moodily atmospheric cinematography, Russian designer Andrej Andrejew’s set designs and Cecil Beaton’s costumes, Ralph Richardson’s magisterial Karenin, and Vivien Leigh’s desperate performance as the doomed heroine, less icy than Greta Garbo’s earlier film interpretations and heralding her Blanche DuBois three years later. 139 min.

Monday, May 18
8:00 Pépé le Moko. 1937. (See Saturday, May 16, 1:30.)

Wednesday, May 20
4:30 Anna Karenina. 1948. (See Sunday, May 17, 5:30.)

8:00 The Great Waltz. 1938. (See Sunday, May 17, 2:30.)

Thursday, May 21
4:30 Untel père et fils (Heart of a Nation). 1940. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. With Louis Jouvet, Michèle Morgan, Raimu, Suzy Prim, Louis Jourdan.
Shortly before the Nazi occupation of Paris and his own exile in America, Duvivier made this rousing, patriotic account of a single French family living across several generations under the specter of three German military invasions. Considered one of Duvivier’s most unsung achievements, the film survived Nazi orders that it be destroyed, and anticipates David Lean and Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed, made four years later, in capturing family life on the home front, from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the drole de guerre (while ignoring, as several critics noted, some of the darker aspects of French social history, including the Dreyfus Affair and the Action française). 110 min.

7:00 Sous le ciel de Paris (Under Paris Skies). 1950. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, René Lefèvre. With Brigitte Auber, Daniel Ivernel, Jean Brochard.
In Duvivier’s valentine to Paris, a dead body floats down the Seine, an open heart beats on the surgical table, an old spinster lives in a garret full of starving cats, a sculptor can scarcely conceal his murderous impulses, and yet it is the romantic pursuits of a young medical student, a photographer’s model, and a country girl that fill the air with an intoxicating joy. From dawn to dusk to dawn, the passionate, comical, tragic, and sinister lives of six Parisians intersect through fate and chance. The film’s beloved and bittersweet title song, later immortalized by Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, and the street photography throughout early 1950s Paris, render this an unacknowledged forerunner to the French New Wave. 110 min.

Friday, May 224:30 La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin. 1929. (See Monday, May 11, 8:00.)

8:00 Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier than the Male). 1956. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Charles Dorat, Maurice Bessy. With Jean Gabin, Danièle Delorme, Robert Arnoux, Gérard Blain.
“Duvivier’s darkest study of moral depravity, this is a harrowing drama of a successful restauranteur (Gabin) who takes in and marries a young angel-faced orphan (Delorme), only to discover she is the conniving daughter of his vengeful ex-wife. The film marked the definitive screen gentrification of Gabin, now in his fifties and destined to play middle-class patriarchs and gentlemen gangsters. Robert Gys’s studio reconstruction of the Halles food market is a masterpiece of production design” (Borger). 114 min.

Saturday, May 23
1:30 Untel père et fils (Heart of a Nation). 1940. (See Thursday, May 21, 4:30.)

5:00 Un Carnet de bal (The Dance Card). 1937. (See Thursday, May 14, 8:00.)

8:00 La Fête à Henriette (Holiday for Henrietta). 1952. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Henri Jeanson. With Dany Robin, Michel Auclair.
In this enchanting classic, beloved by filmmakers like Agnès Varda, Elaine May, and Woody Allen and remade in Hollywood as Paris When It Sizzles, Duvivier and
longtime writing partner Henri Jeanson send up the timeless clash between comedy and drama while also parodying their own screenwriting habits, particularly in Sous le ciel de Paris. Two scriptwriters argue about the fate of Henrietta, a charming and gamine shopgirl. One favors a comical path for their heroine, who is overcome with sentimental love for a young photographer on Bastille Day. The other has a more thrilling and dastardly fate in mind for her. Among the film’s irresistible conceits is Hildegarde Knef as an oversexed circus bareback rider. 118 min.

Sunday, May 24
2:00 Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo). 1951. France/Italy. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, René Barjavel, based on the stories of Giovanni Guareschi. With Fernandel, Gino Cervi, Vera Talchi.
A true French blockbuster, the first in a series of satirical films based on Giovanni Guareschi’s beloved stories, with the great comic actor Fernandel in top form as a famous priest who engages in a battle of cosmic proportions with the parish’s Communist mayor. Duvivier finds wit and warmth—as well as the chance for unity and understanding—in warring ideologies. In Italian, English subtitles. 107 min.

5:00 Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier than the Male). 1956. (See Friday, May 22, 8:00.)

Monday, May 25
7:00 Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo). 1951. (See Sunday, May 24, 2:00.)

Thursday, May 28
8:00 La Fête à Henriette (Holiday for Henrietta). 1952. (See Saturday, May 23, 8:00.)

Jean Gabin Comes to Nashville!

2009-04-04T08:33:00.001-07:00

If you happen to be in Nashville on April 9, 2009, stop by the Downtown Presbyterian Church! No, I'm not kidding: In honor of the Easter holiday, the Church will be screening a 16-millimeter print of Golgotha (1935), director Julien Duvivier's moving tale of the Christ, featuring Jean Gabin as a very sympathetic Pontius Pilate. Duvivier, of course, will also direct Gabin in Pepe Le Moko (1937).

To this author's knowledge, Golgotha hasn't been screened publicly in the U.S. in decades, and if you're anywhere near Nashville, it's definitely worth seeing, because you're probably familiar with the more "famous" Christ movies -- Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, etc. -- and this one is just as important, especially because it is the first "sound" film about Jesus in any language. Here are the details:

http://www.nashvillescene.com/events/lenten-film-series-golgotha-179046/

Read more about Jean Gabin and Golgotha in WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN by Charles Zigman, available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or ask your favorite bookseller.

Jean Gabin, NYC, March 7, 1941

2009-04-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

This Associated Press wirephoto shows Jean Gabin with his date for the evening, Lady Ashley Hamilton, at a New York nightclub on March 7, 1941.

Lady Ashley of Alderly (nee Edith Louise Sylvia Hawkes), at this point, was the widow of swashbuckling silent superstar Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., to whom she had been married for three years, between 1936 and 1939. Nine years after this picture is taken, she will marry Clark Gable (you can read more about her marriage to Gable in this 1950 Photoplay article: http://www.geocities.com/cactus_st/article/article85.html).

During his all-too-brief U.S. period (1941-1943), Jean Gabin also dated Marlene Dietrich and Ginger Rogers. When this picture was taken he had not yet starred in his two American films, Moontide and Impostor.

WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN BY CHARLES ZIGMAN, is available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or ask a bookseller near you.

Parisians See Bracelet Given by Jean Gabin to Marlene Dietrich

2009-04-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

Here's an article I found recently on AFP: Between now and July 2009, visitors to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris can see art deco jewelry designed by Jean Despres -- including a bracelet which Jean Gabin presented to Marlene Dietrich, when the two dated in the 1940s:

Art Deco's life in the fast lane
Mar 21, 2009

PARIS (AFP) — Art Deco was so ahead of its time that its practitioners were accused of being "too modern" and their work looks contemporary today, even though it is more than 80 years old.

The Musee des Art Decoratifs in Paris has mounted a major retrospective to celebrate Jean Despres, one of the fathers of modern jewellery, and other leading "modernist" jewellers working in the Roaring Twenties and Thirties.

"Life was going faster. Cars, planes, trains, everything was going faster. They wanted things to be monumental, so they could be seen from a distance," explains Laurence Mouillefarine, associate curator of the show, picking out some big, showy brooches to illustrate the point.

"They also wanted their work to be more affordable, so they used silver or silver plating instead of gold, and semi-precious stones like citrine, onyx, moonstones and rock crystal, much cheaper than diamonds."

Lacquer, which the Chinese brought to Europe during the war, when it was used as glue on aircraft propellers, was also popular.

The new style was known as "sports jewellery" or "travel jewellery" and still tended to be worn only by an elite, avant-garde set.

"It's hard to appreciate how very daring this was at the time. Costume jewellery didn't exist," says Mouillefarine.

Despres had 80 of his pieces rejected by the jury for the Salon D'Autumne trade show in 1928 for being "too modern," says Melissa Gabardi, who wrote the first monograph on Despres 10 years ago.

Despres was very influenced by Cubism: the painter Georges Braques was his best friend.

During World War I he worked on aircraft engines and his early jewellery was openly inspired by machinery and engine parts, like his camshaft ring.

He initially used silver, because he didn't have the money for more expensive materials, together with coral, onyx, enamel and lapis lazuli.

The ring remained his favourite. "What I enjoy mostly and that I can do in a different way from the others," he told the engraver Etienne Cournault, with whom he collaborated.

The exhibition has a showcase with a chronological display of rings from the 1920s to 1970s and a small room wallpapered with his designs, which "are very easy to wear even today," says Gabardi.

"He was very successful in his lifetime. His work was collected by stars, like Josephine Baker and Andy Warhol," says Gabardi.

But because he didn't have children to carry on the business, he had largely been forgotten by his death in 1980.

Art Deco had already fallen out of fashion by the 1940s. In fact, it wasn't until 1969 that the term "Art Deco" was coined by the British historian and journalist Bevis Hillier to refer to the geometric style of the 20s and 30s.

Apart from the Despres pieces which the artist himself donated to the museum, 80 percent of the exhibits come from private collections, more than half abroad. One of the major contributions is from the American model and face of Victoria's Secret, Stephanie Seymour.

Highlights include a 1930 Cartier bracelet of ballbearings set in gold which actor Jean Gabin gave Marlene Dietrich and a 1932 rock crystal bracelet owned by Gloria Swanson.

A silver pendant with green and black lacquer by Jean Fouquet was acquired in the 1970s by Chanel's chief designer Karl Lagerfeld, a notoriously avid art collector.

A bracelet by Suzanne Belperron was worn by the style icon, American Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

Apart from jewellery, exhibits include exquisite objets d'art -- ultra-slim cigarette cases, rendered obsolete by today's no-smoking laws, with such symbols of modernity as a racing car or a typewriter.

There is even a sleek little vanity case. Once only prostitutes wore make-up, but by the 1920s free-spirited women even dared to make themselves up in public.

It took the curators a full year to track down the items they wanted for the exhibition, as most are in private hands. And even then, sometimes they were frustrated.

"An old lady with a bracelet said she couldn't bear to lend it to the exhibition because she didn't have that much more time left to wear it. I didn't insist," says Mouillefarine.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

MC Jean Gab'1 Takes Over America

2009-04-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

Several months ago on this blogsite, I mentioned MC Jean Gab'1 (pronounced: MC Jean Gabin), the popular French/Senagalese rapper who's taken over France.

Now, MC Jean is poised to take over America! This year, he starred in his first feature, director Pierre Lafargue's BLACK. The film had its U.S. premiere on March 14th at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, and is presently awaiting North American distribution.

It is "this author's" dream that American movie studios will take notice and star MC Jean Gab'1 in his first U.S.-made action movie, and this will be doubly good news, because when the publicity machine gears up to introduce Americans to the rapper, they'll have to, by necessity, call people's attention to the legendary French movie star Jean Gabin (1904-1976) from whom MC Jean Gabin'1 got his name.

For more on both MC Jean Gab'1 and "the original" Jean Gabin, go to www.jeangabinbook.com, and read about (and buy) WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, BY CHARLES ZIGMAN.

www.jeangabinbook.com

3.9 Million French People Watch a Jean Gabin Movie in One Night!

2009-03-25T14:31:00.001-07:00

Left to Right: Sydney Chaplin, Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, and Edward Meeks in director Henri Verneuil's classic 1969 action thriller Le Clan des Siciliens (The Sicilian Clan).

Last night, March 24th at 8:35pm, 3.9 million French people tuned in to watch Jean Gabin in the landmark 1969 film Le Clan des siciliens (The Sicilian Clan) on France's Channel 3, which is pretty fantastic for a 40-year-old movie. John Woo is developing a remake of this legendary caper film, and it's no wonder; as I've mentioned many times on this blogsite, it's a great, fast-paced movie, and worthy of everybody's attention -- and I'm not just talking about Gabin Fans, but everybody who likes very cool movies.

Incidentally, Charlie Chaplin's son, Sydney Chaplin, who plays one of Gabin's sons-in-law in the film, passed away in Rancho, Mirage California on March 3, 2009 at the age of 82. Actor-restaurateur-bon vivant Sydney Chaplin appeared in thirty-one feature films as an actor, including not only The Sicilian Clan but also two films directed by his father -- Limelight (1952) and The Countess From Hong Kong (1967).

For more about Jean Gabin, read WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, by Charles Zigman, available through Amazon.com, or ask for it at your "finer" booksellers...

Sources
SICILIAN CLAN ON FRENCH T.V., 3.9 MILLION VIEWERS:
http://www.tvmag.com/article/divertissement/43696/le-clan-des-siciliens-sauve-l-honneur.html

SYDNEY CHAPLIN:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0152261/bio

Jean Gabin Trading Card, Germany, Late 1950s

2009-03-25T14:21:00.001-07:00

I just discovered this great Jean Gabin trading card, produced in Germany in the late 1950s, on eBay. (I didn't bid on it, so it's still out there if you want to.)

It encapsulizes the whole Jean Gabin movie persona -- tough; quiet; injured in love...

You gotta love eBay!

Read WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO by Charles Zigman, available from Amazon.com.

Daughter of Jean Gabin Directs a Wonderful New Movie, And You Can Watch It Right Now:

2009-03-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

In my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, I mentioned that in 2006, Gabin's daughter Florence Moncorge-Gabin had just directed her first feature film, Le Passager de l'ete (Passenger of the Summer).

This week, Americans, including myself, have finally been able to see this film for the first time, and the superb Passager de l'ete proves that talent runs in the family. Florence Moncorge-Gabin is a top-notch filmmaker.

Passager de l'ete is a classic bodice-ripper, in the style of Tennessee Williams' The Long, Hot Summer and William Inge's Picnic. In Passager, which sets its scene in 1950, 'hunky' drifter Joseph (Grigori Darangere) shows up on the Brittany farm belonging to fortysomething Monique (the stellar Catherine Frot), and as he begins laboring on the farm (this includes the requisite sweaty 'wood-chopping' and 'cow-milking' scenes), he sets all hearts aflutter -- and not just Monique's heart, but also the hearts of Monique's twentysomething daugther Jeanne (Laurie Smet), as well as the town's luminous resident pharmacist (and roundheels), Angele (Mathilde Seigner).

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Le Passager de l'ete (the English subtitles incorrectly simplify the title, as "One Summer"), might have come across as pure Harlequin Romance, but Florence Moncorge and her cinematographer Jean-Francois Robin are such masterful visual stylists, that the film is as lush and poetic as Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. (The film's compositions also reminded me of Francois Millet's 1857 painting, "The Gleaners.") Jean-Claude Petit contributes a haunting orchestral score that stays in your head when the film is over and demonstrates that he has the same chops as any of the great current American film composers.

Lions Gate Entertainment is distributing Le Passager de l'ete in North America in an English-subtitled version, but not on DVD: You can see it exclusively as a 'video-download' on Amazon.com, and here is the link, which you can paste into your browser:

http://www.amazon.com/Le-Passager-De-Lete/dp/B001OEHZNQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-video&qid=1237857519&sr=8-1

After watching the first two minutes and eight seconds of Le Passager de l'ete on-line, free of charge (on the Amazon website) you may opt to either "rent" the film for a twenty-four hour period, which will cost you $2.99, or you can "buy it" for $9.95, and the title will stay in your 'on-line Amazon video library' so you can watch it as many times as you want, forever. Normally, 'this author' is a bit trepidatious about watching films over the computer, but the quality and picture size are both very good, and you can even download the film to your TiVo, if you're technically/digitally inclined -- which I am not.

In my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, I mentioned that Jean Gabin did not want his daughter Florence to enter the movie world, but she was right to do so, and you can see the results in the splendid 2006 feature which she has directed, Le Passager de l'ete. It's a great film.

Two Jean Gabin Movies to be Remade in 2009!

2009-02-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the three new Jean Gabin DVD releases that we're getting this spring.

There's some equally important Gabin News this week: Two Jean Gabin movies will be re-made in 2009! A few months ago I mentioned that director John Woo was developing his re-make of the high-octane 1969 Jean Gabin thriller Le Clan des Siciliens (The Sicilian Clan), so that's something to look forward to (or: maybe not, since the original is as close to perfection as you can get, in a heist movie).

Well, here's some up-to-the minute news which was just announced on February 18th, 2009:

This year, the French director Tonie Marshall (Passe-Passe, 2008), who is also an actress of great repute, will helm a brand new re-make of Jean Gabin's 1956 noir mindroaster Voici le temps des assassins, a film which is widely considered, throughout France (as well as by the director Bertrand Tavernier) to be the final masterpiece of director Julien Duvivier, who had earlier directed Gabin in Pepe Le Moko, La Belle equipe, Maria Chapdelaine, and Impostor, and who continued to direct movies up through his death in 1967. Of course, as with many other Jean Gabin movies I wrote about in my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, the original Gabin/Duvivier version of Voici le temps is completely unknown in the United States today, even though it was released in one NYC theater in 1957 for about a week, in a severly truncated (cut by 15 minutes) and horribly English-dubbed version, which completely castrates Duvivier's intended vision. (I actually saw this bastardized version, courtesty of a collector who sent me a VHS transfer of her own 16 millimeter print; it's shocking how American distributors used to butcher great classics of foreign films, including a number of Jean Gabin movies.)

In Voici le temps des assassins, chef Andre Chatelin (Jean Gabin in the old version, Gerard Depardieu in the new, upcoming re-make) owns a restaurant in the Les Halles section of Paris (Les Halles, of course, is the large outdoor market in the 1st arrondissement) who gets grifted by a team of manipulative, hopped-up mother and daughter prostitutes, two unsavory women who turn his life into a living hell. To tell you more would spoil the surprise, because Voici le temps des assassins offers one great twist after another -- even a final twist which is actually jaw-dropping, in the truest sense of the word.

Hopefully, this new re-make of Voici le temps des assassins will lead to a greater awareness of the original Gabin/Duvivier version, here in America. Since Tonie Marshall is a very good director, I'm sure that the re-make stands a good chance as well. Marshall is the daughter of the French actress Micheline Presle, who co-starred with Jean Gabin in 1960's Le Baron de l'ecluse, and the American film actor William Marshall, who appeared in a number of movies in the 1940s and weirdly, William Marshall was also married to both Michele Morgan (Gabin's most important co-star)and Ginger Rogers (Gabin's lover, in the 1940s).

BREAKING NEWS: Yesterday, February 27th, 2009, the actor Jean-Paul Roussillon, age 80, won Best Supporting Actor at the Cesars, the French version of the Academy Awards, for his role in director Arnaud Desplechin's new film Un Conte de Noel, which was released in the U.S., at the end of '08, as A Christmas Tale. Fifty-three years ago, in 1956, a much younger Rousillon played Amedee, one of 'chef' Jean Gabin's sous-chefs, in the original Voici le temps des assassins.

2009 Begins With Three (3) New Jean Gabin DVD Releases, First Time With English Subtitles!

2009-02-12T04:05:00.001-08:00

2009 starts out with an embarrassment of riches for Jean Gabin fans.

Not one, not two, but three (3) Jean Gabin movies are being released on DVD. And none of these titles has ever been released on home video with English subtitles. When I originally watched these three films to research them for my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, I was relying on French language DVDs with no English subtitles at all, and watching them with 'human translators' who provided simultaneous French-to-English translations for me (me, with my limited -- or, should I say, non-existent -- French), so these three releases are really unexpected treats.

1. RAZZIA SUR LA CHNOUF (1955), directed by Henri Decoin is, for me, the best of the many film noir thrillers in which Jean Gabin starred in the 1950s, and in my personal opinion, it even edges out Gabin's noir film which is universally acknowledged as being "the important one" -- director Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954). In Razzia, as in the previous year's Grisbi, Gabin portrays a gentleman-gangster who's uncovering corruption within his own crime organization, and both films share the same tone. Razzia, though, is more 'trippy' and experimental than Grisbi, and features a few scenes (particularly one set in a bar) which I would characterize as being 'pre-psychedelic,' and kind of anticipative of some of the wilder moments in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, which would come two years later. IMPORTANT NOTE: The English subtitled DVD of Razzia sur la chnouf is not an 'official' release, which is to say that it's a high-end bootleg, but the transfer and the electronic subtitles are very high quality. You can only buy the subtitled version from this on-line merchant -- www.notavailableondvd.com -- and this is important to remember, because there are legitimate DVDs of Razzia available on Amazon.com (US) and Amazon. fr (France), but they do NOT have subtitles. The DVD comes in a plain envelope -- there's no cover-art or extras, but at $12.50 ($10 + 2.50 postage), it's a great buy, and notavailableondvd.com ships fast. This DVD is a February 2009 release.
http://www.notavailableondvd.com/index.php?productID=17562.

2. GAS-OIL (1955): Another brand new Jean Gabin DVD release, also 'unofficial' and available with English subtitles ONLY from one on-line seller, is director Gilles Grangier's Gas-Oil, a terrific picture which also happen to be the only movie to co-star Jean Gabin with another French icon, Jeanne Moreau, although Moreau did have a small, supporting role in the previous year's Touchez pas au grisbi. In this picture (which was almost entitled Hi-Jack Highway) as in the following year's Des gens sans importance, Gabin is a trucker (he even drives the truck himself, according to the credits!)who's on the lam from the mob, because they think he's stolen their cache of cash. In the 1950s, American 'car culture' spread to the world, so you get movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Robert Mitchum's Thunder Road in the US, and Gas-Oil in France. If you want to see this DVD with English subtitles, you get it from this excellent online seller, 'Senor Noir,' who also happens to sell a lot of other great international noirs on DVD, and the best news is that it's only $9, including postage. This is a February 2009 release. http://www.ioffer.com/i/Rare-DVD-NOIRS-CRIME-DRAMA-FILMS-Free-Shipping-55224356

3. L'AIR DE PARIS (1954): In March 2009, we get an "official" release, L'Air de Paris , and this movie now has English subtitles for the very first time, as well. This is the picture which reunited Jean Gabin with director and co-star from 1939's Le Jour se leve, Marcel Carne and Arletty, to which it is a worthy follow-up. In this movie, Gabin is a former boxer who takes a young protege (actor Roland Lesaffre, who passed away on February 3, 2009) and trains him to be France's new champion, much to the chagrin of Gabin's wife (Arletty) who feels that Gabin is spending more time with the protege than with her -- so it's kind of a love-triangle, and it's also just as worthy a film about boxing as Raging Bull, Body and Soul, and Champion. Optimum Home Video is releasing this title on March 16, 2009, and you can pre-order it from Amazon.co.uk (British Amazon.com); note that this is a Region 2/'PAL'-system DVD, which means that while it won't play on conventional American 'NTSC' DVD players, you CAN play it on your computer's DVD drive, OR you can buy an international DVD player for less than $200 from various on-line sellers (just Google "codeless DVD player"); it's a good idea to have an international DVD player anyway, if you're a serious movie buff, because there a lot of great movies available on DVD in Europe which aren't available on DVD in the US. (Of course, you can order from British Amazon.com if you live anywhere in the world, and Amazon converts the 'pounds sterling' to 'dollars' on your credit card statement.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LAir-Paris-Jean-Gabin/dp/B001NDT9V4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1234442488&sr=8-1

BREAKING NEWS! POST-SCRIPT: It's now March 2nd, and I have just learned that an eBay seller based in Korea is selling a "Region Free" DVD of "L'Air de Paris" with English subtitles, which you can play on any DVD player in the world -- including ALL American DVD players. It's only $11.99 + $2.99 for shipment to the US. I bought one for myself and the quality is excellent, and the seller's turnaround time is fast. Here's the info for this eBay seller:
http://cgi.ebay.com/LAir-de-Paris-1954-Jean-Gabin-DVD-NEW-S-H-2-99_W0QQitemZ320344953510QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUS_DVD_HD_DVD_Blu_ray?hash=item320344953510&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

So: How about that?! Not one, not two, but three great Jean Gabin movies, available on DVD with English subtitles for the first time!

To learn more about Razzia sur la chnouf, Gas-Oil, and L'Air de Paris, read my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=World%27s+Coolest+Movie+Star%2C+Jean+Gabin

Jean Gabin Sightings in Seattle, Miami

2009-02-01T19:54:00.000-08:00

2009 started off with a bang -- and that 'bang' was supplied by the heater of Jean Gabin, whose 1937 classic Pepe Le Moko played at Seattle's SIFF theater on Friday January 16th, as part of the repertory theater's 37-film festival "French Crime Wave, 1937-1981." Similar to the festival which played at New York's Film Forum in '08, this Seattle festival also featured a rare screening of Gabin's 1969 thriller The Sicilian Clan on Thursday January 20th.

And there's more to come:

On Thursday February 19th, the Miami Beach Cinematheque (512 Espanola Way, Miami Beach) will feature a rare 35mm screening of director Max Ophuls' 1952 classic Le Plaisir, the only film collaboration between Ophuls and Gabin, as part of a three-film Ophuls festival (the other two films to be screened are 1950's La Ronde and 1955's Lola Montes).

A three-part anthology film based upon the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, Le Plaisir, besides being one of Ophuls' characteristically entertaining idylls, is also unusual in the Gabin cinema canon, because it's one of the rare films in which we get a smiling, cheerful Gabin, in lieu of the somber tough guy we're used to.

Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles... Jean Gabin is Everywhere.

www.jeangabinbook.com

Jacques Bar, Produced 7 Jean Gabin Films, Dies in Paris

2009-02-01T07:56:00.000-08:00

On January 19, 2009, legendary French producer Jacques Bar passed away in Paris, at the age of 87.

Bar, one of the shining lights of French cinema, produced 83 films during a lengthy career which spanned the years between 1949 (La Maternelle) and 2004 (Steven Soderbergh's segment of the anthology film, Eros).

He produced seven of actor Jean Gabin's best "late period" movies -- Le Rouge est mis (1957); Les Vieux de la vieille (1960); Le Cave se rebiffe (1961); Un Singe en hiver (1962); Le Gentleman d'Epsom (1962); and Melodie en sous-sol (1963). All of those titles, except for Le Rouge est mis, were released in the US by MGM in the early '60s, although MGM/UA, and Warner Bros., which owns the MGM/UA catalog today, did not retain their English-subtitled prints (which is par for the course for many of Gabin's movies). Jacques Bar's Gabin pictures represent some of the star's classiest productions, and most were filmed and released in Cinemascope. Bar also produced innumerable features starring two of France's best-loved comedians (both friends of Jean Gabin), Fernandel and Bourvil.

Bar, who was on the Board of Directors of the Musee Gabin (Jean Gabin Museum) in Meriel, France produced a number of other great movies, including Jules Dassin's criminally underrated La Legge (The Law, 1959) which featured Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni, and Yves Montand; Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953, uncredited); Les Felins (aka, Joy House, w/Jane Fonda and Alain Delon, 1964); and, later in his career, both the French and American versions of Gerard Depardieu's stateside hit My Father the Hero (1991 and 1994). Film noir buffs know that Bar produced two of the most hard-boiled, fast-paced neo-noirs -- Ralph Nelson's French/U.S. co-production Once a Thief (1965, starring Alain Delon, Ann-Margret, and Jack Palance) and director Jacques Deray's Outside Man (1973, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Roy Scheider, and Ann-Margret).

www.jeangabinbook.com

Happy New Year from www.JeanGabinBook.com

2009-01-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from www.jeangabinbook.com and WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN.

Tune in to this blog in 2009 for Jean Gabin news, Jean Gabin updates, Jean Gabin events (near you!), and new information and facts about Jean Gabin that go "beyond the book."

Thank you to everybody who has already bought WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR.

57 Minutes into Pepe Le Moko

2008-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

Premiere Magazine, before it went belly-up, used to run a monthly column called "Gaffe Squad," in which the writers would point out mistakes in various movies -- an errant boom microphone dipping into the top of the frame, a caveman wearing a Timex, characters looking off into the wrong direction, etc.

Brian D. Scott, a Texas Jean Gabin fan, emailed to tell me that he just found a mistake in Gabin's most classic movie, Pepe Le Moko: Brian noticed (correctly) that 57 minutes into the movie, Pepe, who's wearing a dark shirt and a light tie with dots on it, sits down and his jacket opens up to reveal "J.G." ("Jean Gabin") on his left breast pocket!

I checked the scene out for myself, and Brian is right! Even classic movies have the occasional gaffe.

Merry Christmas from www.JeanGabinBook.com

World's Coolest Science Fiction Movie! Jean Gabin in "Le Tunnel" (1933)

2008-12-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

Everybody has a favorite science fiction movie -- whether it's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, or even Angry Red Planet.
But one of the best-ever science fiction movies, in this author's view, was made in 1933 -- and in America, it is completely unknown!

In 1930, the German author wrote a book called Der Tunnel, and it became an instant best-seller in that country; it's the powerful (and fictional) story of a quietly powerful engineer who spearheads the first underground transatlantic tunnel, spanning between Europe and the U.S.; we see both the European and American teams building together, with the emphasis on the American team. The idea is that a super train will be built between the two continents, thus bringing the entire world together, in the spirit of brotherhood.

In 1933, the German production company UFA produced two simultaneous versions of the film -- one in the German language featuring German actors and director, and a second version in France, which featured French actors and director. Both versions are reportedly the same, shot-for-shot and cut-for-cut, and it's important to note that, before subtitles became common, countries used to make entire versions of their films in different languages, for export to different countries. For me, it is the French version which is of more interest, because it starred the great international movie star, Jean Gabin, in the only science fiction movie of his entire forty-six year, ninety-five film career.

Four years after Le Tunnel, Jean Gabin, of course, would become internationally famous for a handful of movies in which he starred in the mid-to-late 1930s, including Pepe Le Moko, La Grande illusion, La Bete humaine, and Le Jour se leve -- films in which he played movie history's consummate 'tragic drifter,' a man who was tough on the outside and marshmallow-soft on the inside. But in the Tunnel, his 12th movie in only four years (he had begun starring in movies in 1930), thirty-year-old Gabin's quietly powerful personality is already fully-formed, and he's on the top of his game.

In La Tunnel, Jean Gabin is great as MacAllan, the engineer who spearheads the building from the American side. (Yes, the American team is played by French actors, speaking French, which is a bit disconcerting, at first.) Along the way, MacAllan's workers are beset by all manner of problems, including a bad guy trying to sabotage the project, deceitful workers, and tunnel sickness. But he overcomes them all and leads his team to victory.

Besides being one of the great science fiction movies of the 1930s -- it definitely rivals the other 1930s sci-fi movie that's been universally recognized as the stalwart in that genre, director William Cameron Menzies 1937 vision of Victor Hugo's Things to Come in both its ever-present humanity and in its ground-breaking special effects, which are just as awe-inspiring as any CGI effects today (particularly the bullet trains) -- Le Tunnel is probably the only Jean Gabin movie which could be re-made today by a major Hollywood studio, because it's exactly the kind of big, plot-driven picture that Jerry Bruckheimer does very well.

The bad news, is that the film is not available on DVD in the United States. The good news, is that it IS available on DVD in France -- although the film is presented in its original French language only, and there are no English subtitles or English dubbing.

So if you work for Criterion or Rialto, and you want to introduce Americans to a great, rousing sci-fi classic -- look into Le Tunnel!.

PS: While you're waiting on the French-language/Jean Gabin version of The Tunnel to be released on US DVD, the good news, is that right now, you can take a look at a subsequent version of the film which was made two years later, in English, as a U.S./British co-production, and which IS available on DVD in North America: It's 1935's The Tunnel, directed by _______; based on the same source material as the French version (the novel), it's "almost" as good as the Gabin version and, while it doesn't feature Gabin, it does have the American cowboy star Richard Dix as MacAllan (with Walter Huston ably aiding and abetting in the role of the sympathetic/humanistic President of the United States).

Marlene Dietrich: Her "Lost" Film is Not Lost!

2008-12-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

Between 1930 (Blue Angel) and 1978 (Just a Gigolo), Marlene Dietrich starred in thirty-five sound films, and all of them are known in the United States -- all of them, that is, except for one; in fact, all of Marlene Dietrich's sound features are known in the US except for one of her best films:

In 1946, Marlene Dietrich co-starred with her real-life lover Jean Gabin, the great French movie icon (and star of Pepe Le Moko and La Grande illusion) in director George Lacombe's hypnotic Martin Roumaganc, a kind of proto-Streetcar Named Desire -- released in fact, only a year before Williams' Streetcar premiered on Broadway -- in which a small time prostitute played by Dietrich (as in Streetcar, her character's name is Blanche) falls in manipulative love with an inarticulate, rough-hewn, "pre-Stanley Kowalski" contractor named Martin (Jean Gabin), torturing him emotionally until he commits a savage act.

The long and short of it, is that Martin Roumagnac is amazing, and the fact that it is completely unknown in the United States today, is entirely related to the fact that when it was very briefly released in the US in 1948, as The Room Upstairs (one movie theater in NYC, a one week run) the film's North American distribution company, the now-defunct Lopert Pictures, excised 31 minutes from the 115-minute film, apparently rendering its own 80-minute cut completely senseless: According to published reports, in the truncated US/Lopert cut, all references to the fact that Marlene Dietrich's character is a prostitute were removed, and since the whole film is about the fact that Dietrich's character is a prostitute, one can only imagine how choppy this version may have been.)

After this quick one-theater/one-week release in 1948, Martin Roumaganc was was never heard from in the US again -- in fact, for more than fifty years, the complete version of the film was hard-to-come by even in France, for a very simple reason: Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich were ensconsed in a torrid, real-life affair throughout the early-to-mid 1940s, and when they broke up (Gabin wanted Dietrich to marry him, but she was already married -- a lifelong marriage of convenience to the production designer Rudolph Sieber) Gabin was apparently so distraught, he bought up, and destroyed, as many of the uncut prints of Martin Roumagnac as were available!

In 2006, however, Canal + released the completely uncut Martin Roumagnac in a digitally restored edition on DVD; I saw it when I was researching my new Jean Gabin book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, and it's truly an astounding film -- a haunting 1940s classic, with cinematography by Roger Hubert (he shot Carne's Les Enfants du paradis) which recalls the great look that DP Henri Alekan gave to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. While you can purchase the uncut Martin Roumagnac DVD on line, from Amazon France (www.amazon.fr) or from www.FNAC.com, it's a Region 2 DVD, which means that it is only playable on European DVD machines (unless you own an international DVD player, which isn't too hard to find) and it is in French only -- which is to say that the DVD has neither English subtitles nor English dubbing.

Part of the reason I wrote my new book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN is because I wanted to introduce American readers to Jean Gabin's movies, many of which, like Roumagnac, have never received proper US releases, in theaters or on DVD. Anyway, hopefully, some forward-thinking US company (Rialto or Criterion?) will one day, and sooner rather than later, release Martin Roumagnac on an English-subtitled DVD, so that American audiences can enjoy this great "missing" 1940s film classic. Never before had Marlene Dietrich been so alluring; never before had Gabin been so cool...

To find out more about Martin Roumagnac, more about the Dietrich/Gabin affair, and more about how Martin Roumagnac may have been squelched in the United States because it may have "directly inspired" Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, which premiered on stage in New York a year after Martin Roumaganc had its (very) limited theatrical release in New York, go to www.jeangabinbook.com and read WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO.

www.JeanGabinBook.com

Great Holiday Gift Book for Classic Movie Lovers: World's Coolest Movie Star

2008-12-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

If you're scratching your head, wondering what to buy the classic movie lover in your life for the Holidays, here's the (two-volume book) for you. And if you've ever heard the expression, "Come with me to the Casbah" -- it's time to meet the man who spoke those legendary words.

Russia. Poland. Romania. Czech Republic. Mexico. Japan. Iran.
All over the world -- everywhere except in the U.S. -- the legendary Jean Gabin continues to be considered one of the greatest movie stars of all time, and in the U.S., he is, of course, considered to be quite the cult figure (in 2002, twin Gabin festivals were presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Walter Reade Theatres in New York). Jean Gabin is/was also one of the all-time-favorite movie stars of Johnny Depp, David Mamet, Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, Sergio Leone, and Jack Kerouac. For the vast majority of the moviegoing public, and just like a lot of the greats, he's managed to have fallen off of the radar a bit.

That's about to change, however, because in 2008, Allenwood Press presents the very first English-language (and two-volume) book about Jean Gabin, ever. (There's not even an old, out-of-print book about Gabin in English, if you can believe that!) It's WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN by CHARLES ZIGMAN.

VOLUME ONE, which has been subtitled "Tragic Drifter," takes us through Gabin's first forty-six films, including the internationally reknowned "Grand Illusion" and "Pepe Le Moko," a period spanning the years 1930 to 1953, during which time the actor played movie history's most famous tragic drifter. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gabin's popularity in the U.S. nearly even eclipsed that of Bogart, James Cagney, and Bette Davis. (Ever heard anybody say, "Come with me to the Casbah. We will make ze beautiful muzeek togezaire?" Well, that line was famously attributed to the character Jean Gabin portrayed in the 1937 gangster classic "Pepe Le Moko," even though he never actually uttered those words -- in fact, Gabin's 'Pepe' character even inspired Warner Bros. to create its legendary cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, whose looks and voice were modeled on the actor.)

VOLUME TWO, which has been subtitled "Comeback/Patriarch" covers Films 47 through 95, which Gabin made between 1954 and 1976. During this period of his career, instead of playing the tragic drifter, the actor played a series of mega-cool gentleman-criminals, and world-weary (yet life-loving) patriarchs. Jean Gabin would even turn out some hilarious comedies during this period -- films which are criminally unknown in the U.S.

The tone of the book is "fun" (as opposed to "academic" and "pretentious") and its goal is to introduce as many people as possible to the films of Gabin; to that end, it's loaded with rare photographs, many of which have never appeared even in previously published French-language books about Gabin.

This is a book for Jean Gabin 'newbies' and 'completists' both: For the uninitiated, there are biography and 'intro' chapters which place Gabin and his famous big-screen persona into perspective. For the completists, author Charles Zigman has 'unpacked' every single one of Jean Gabin's ninety-five theatrical feature films, even the more than fifty pictures which have never been subtitled into English before, so that readers can feel, by poring through the chapters, that they are actually experiencing the films firsthand. Excerpts from newspapers written 'back in the day,' both in the U.S. and in Europe, demonstrate how prominent movie critics received Gabin's pictures the day they were first released, in the 1930s through the 1970s. In short this two-volume book is for everybody.

Besides being the first book about Jean Gabin to appear in the English language, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR is also a first, because it is the very first 'filmography book' related to Gabin in any language: Even in France, where there have been many published biographies of Gabin, there has never been a book which concentrates in great detail on each of the actor's ninety-five films.

The legendary actress Michele Morgan, who appeared with Gabin in five feature films, has written the foreword to Volume One, and Brigitte Bardot contributed an original foreword to Volume Two.

The books retail at $39.95 each (total, $79.90 for both books) but you can buy them both together, at Amazon.com, for $63.92, a savings of about $16.00 (scroll down to the bottom of the Amazon listing to see the "buy together" option).

For Christmas 2008, it's time for Americans to learn what the rest of the world has always known. Jean Gabin is THE WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR.

To learn more about Gabin and to buy, go to:

www.jeangabinbook.com

or:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Charles+Zigman

An Email from France's Minister of Culture

2008-12-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

Every once in awhile, I receive a nice note or email from somebody who has read WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, my book about Jean Gabin (www.jeangabinbook.com).

Today, I was delighted to receive this unexpected email from the office of France's Minister of Culture, the Honorable Christine Albanel.

Monsieur Charles ZIGMAN

Nos réf. : CC/19396/MAC

Monsieur,

Vous avez bien voulu adresser à Christine Albanel, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, vos deux livres consacrés à Jean Gabin.

La ministre a pris connaissance avec beaucoup de plaisir de ces deux ouvrages et m’a chargé de vous remercier pour votre contribution de grande qualité à la mémoire d’une étoile du cinéma français.

Je vous prie d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments les meilleurs.

Le Chef de cabinet

Olivier BREUILLY

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

Sir,

Christine Albanel, Minister of Culture and Communication, has received your two books devoted to Jean Gabin.

The Minister noted these two books with great pleasure, and has asked me to thank you for your contribution of high-quality memory of a star of French cinema.

Please accept the assurances of my best.

The Chief of Staff,
Olivier BREUILLY
______________________________________________
PS: Some Gabin "Dribs and Drabs" for a December Morning:

-- reader Brian D. Scott emailed and told me that he remembers Telly Savalas playing Pepe Le Moko on the old CBS "Carol Burnett Show;"
-- Lawrence Peck tells me that there is (or was, a few years ago) a karaoke bar in Seoul, Korea called "The Jean Gabin Club," and he's trying to find his old matchbook with the silhouette of Gabin on it... I'll post it here, if it ever turns up.

Happy Thanksgiving From JeanGabinBook.com

2008-11-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving from WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN (www.jeangabinbook.com).

Here's a picture of Jean Gabin, taken at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955.

And here's a link to a website called "Screengrab:" It's an article about Movie History's 25 Greatest Leading Men of All Time, and Gabin is listed at #12!

http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/screengrab/archive/2008/10/09/screengrab-salutes-the-top-25-leading-men-of-all-time-part-three.aspx

Eastbound and Down: Jean Gabin Played a Trucker in Two Great Films

2008-11-26T11:23:00.001-08:00

During the second half of his illustrious film career, which I've documented in the second volume of my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND OF JEAN GABIN, an 'older' Jean Gabin, in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s played any number of ultra cool/suave gentleman-gangsters, cops, mentors, and white-haired patriarchs.

He also played, in two movies which were made in quick succession, in 1955 and 1956, truckers. And if you think about it, who better to play a trucker than Jean Gabin - truckers, like Gabin (in real-life and in his movies) are professional and contemplative (one would hope) drifters who spend long stretches of life driving along life's existential, and real, highways.

Gas-Oil (1955) and Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance] (1956), are two masterful movies in which Gabin played surly, world-weary truckdrivers, and his performances in each film are top drawer. Weirdly, while both of these movies are considered to be important classics of 1950s cinema in France, neither of them was ever released in the United States. (Gas-Oil's production company, Intermondia, considered releasing Gas-Oil in the United States, even reportedly striking an English subtitled print, which it re-titled Hi-Jack Highway, but a US release never happened.)

In director Gilles Grangier's taut Gas-Oil, Gabin appears opposite another French screen legend, Jeanne Moreau. He's trucker Jean Chape (the rough translation in English is "Jean the Man!") and he's on the lam from a bunch of hardcore thugs who think he's stolen their cache of money -- which, decidely, he has not. Gas-Oil is the only film in which Gabin and Moreau ever co-starred, although the legendary actress did have a small, supporting role in the previous year's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), the film noir which brought Gabin into what was essentially his "second" career in France -- that period during which he played the 'older' guy, instead of the matinee idol which he had played when he was younger.

In director Henri Verneuil's Des gens sans importance, married fifty-something Gabin is trapped in a loveless marriage, but finds solace -- not to mention succor -- in the arms of twentysomething Francoise Arnoul (who also starred with Gabin in the previious year's French Can-Can), and their May-December romance, glorious at first, takes an unfortunate turn for the tragic.

While neither Gas-Oil nor Des gens sans importance has ever been available in America, they ARE both available on DVD in France -- however these two PAL (European)-format DVDs are in French-only -- in other words, there are no English-subtitles; if you're fluent in French, you can find them on French Amazon.com (www.amazon.fr) or on FNAC.com.

If anybody from the Criterion Collection happens to be reading this, these two truckeriffic Gabin efforts from the mid '50s would really benefit from being packaged together in a 2-film boxed set... with English subtitles, of course!

On May 22 and 23, 2004, All The Mail in France Featured a Special Jean Gabin Postmark.

2008-11-22T16:13:00.000-08:00

The great French movie icon Jean Gabin was born on May 17, 1904, and on May 22 and 23, 2004, on the occasion of what would have been his one hundredth birthday, all of the posted mail in France bore this special Jean Gabin Postmark -- for two days only.

Here is an envelope bearing the special Jean Gabin postmark. It was sent to me by Corinne Marchal of the Jean Gabin Museum in Meriel, France -- and Meriel was, of course, Gabin's birthplace. (Of course, this envelope is actually Jean Gabin museum stationery!)

You can click on the picture of the envelope to enlarge it.

www.JeanGabinBook.com

Los Angeles-Area Restaurant Offered a Jean Gabin Menu in 2002.

2008-11-22T15:54:00.000-08:00

In 2002, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) held a twelve-film Jean Gabin retrospective. At that time, there was a French restaurant across the street from the Museum called the Brasserie des Artistes.

In conjunction with the festival, the Brasserie featured a special, "limited time" Gabin Menu featuring Gabin's favorite foods, wherein you could bring your ticket stub from the LACMA festival over to the restaurant, enjoy the meals that Jean Gabin loved best, and get $2 off your dinner check -- just by presenting a special handbill/flyer that was given out at the Museum.

I wanted to post the Brasserie's menu on this blogsite about a month ago, when I wrote the entry about Gabin's favorite foods, but I didn't have a copy, and I was frustrated over the fact that I hadn't kept the copy I used to have. But my friend Lawrence Peck, whom I've known since first grade (!), did manage to keep a copy. He sent it to me this week, and here it is! (You can click on the menu to enlarge it.) If the menu selections sound familiar to you they should, because about a month ago, I posted a blog about 'Gabin's Favorite Foods' (I asked the Gabin Museum's Corinne Marchal to list them for me) and this is essentially the same list.

PS -- Don't try to go to the Brasserie des Artistes to enjoy your Gabin Meal, though; the restaurant shut its doors a couple of years ago.

www.JeanGabinBook.com

A Handwritten Letter From Jean Gabin (Rare 1918 Artifact)

2008-11-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a rare artifact which was just brought to my attention by Corinne Marchal, who sent it to me (she's the Webmaster of the Jean Gabin Museum in Meriel, France): It's a letter written by Jean Gabin -- in the original French, in his own hand -- in 1918, when he was fourteen years old. My friend Laurence Bardet-Danton translated the letter from French into English, exclusively for this blog posting, and you can click on the letter to enlarge it.

Some background about the letter:

As you know from reading my new book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, Jean Gabin absolutely adored his sister Madeleine who was older than him by seven years, and he was threatened, at first, when Madeleine begain dating a boxer by the name of Jean Poesy.

What Gabin didn't count on, is that he'd really grow to admire Poesy -- Poesy, in effect, became "the father that Jean Gabin never had," since Gabin's real father, Ferdinand, was often away from home, performing in musical theater. In fact, Poesy would eventually set up a boxing studio in Meriel, where he would teach "the sweet science" to Jean and other teens.

Following, is the English translation of the letter. Gabin has written it to his sister Madeleine and to Poesy who were vacationing together in Paris, at the time. In the letter, we see that Madeleine will be returning home to Meriel for a visit, but that she will not be bringing Poesy along on this trip -- and young Gabin is sad, because he was really looking forward to seeing him, and even having Poesy join a local soccer team. (The stream-of-consciousness-style teen-aged grammar is Gabin's own):

"Dear Madeleine and Dear Poesy:

We have received your letter yesterday evening and I thank you... in Meriel we had a big storm and it was difficult to walk. To go up the path, I had to bend my head and battle with the wind. To talk about something else, I want to tell you that I am very angry that Poesy is not coming. He absolutely must come. We would be very happy to see him. He can spare 8 days to set up the room [here, Gabin is referencing the boxing studio which Poesy would soon be organizing in Meriel].

There will be no people in the trade right away ...You should come because I am in the Second soccer [team], and you should come for a month, because it's not expensive. It's 20 cents a month. You could be on the First team; the Meriel guys would carry you high in triumph because you are a lightweight champion of FRANCE; you would, at least, beat a guy from the "Racing Club" [another local French soccer team]... To finish my letter: Madeleine, Please come and tell me when you will be arriving, so I can pick you up at the Meriel station. Father has been in a bad mood lately, and he will be in a good mood when he sees you!

Your Jean who will always love you."
(Meriel, 1918)

www.jeangabinbook.com

Larry McMurtry: Jean Gabin Fan!

2008-11-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

Larry McMurty: Author/Jean Gabin Fan

As I mention in my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, Gabin, besides being a great actor, was also a farmer. Watch how McMurtry leads into a review of a book about Jesse James with a mention of Gabin!
(Reprinted from The New Republic, 10/14/02)!

Larry McMurtry, The New Republic,
10/14/02
Rebel, Rebel
by Larry McMurtry

Peasant revolts are usually bloodier than they are funny, but a funny one occurred in Normandy in 1972, when seven hundred peasants woke up the French actor Jean Gabin to complain that he was hogging too much land—some six hundred acres at the time. In vain did Jean Gabin—once more or less the face of France—argue that he had earned his acreage; after a vigorous debate he agreed to lend half of it. It was lucky for Gabin that he got too big for his britches in Normandy rather than in Missouri, and in 1972 rather than 1872, the heyday of Jesse James. In Missouri there would have been no peasant council, just a bushwhacker with a pistol, possibly Jesse James himself.

I mention Jean Gabin's difficulty because T.J. Stiles, after carrying the reader scrupulously through Jesse James's violent, violent life, bumps in his concluding pages into Eric Hobsbawm's much-disputed theory of social banditry, a notion first elaborated in a book called Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels (1959). The concept resurfaces a decade later in a simpler Hobsbawm book called merely Bandits, in which Jesse James comes in for rather sketchy mention. In Hobsbawm's view, social bandits emerge from rural, pre-capitalist peasant societies, and they champion peasant needs in conflicts with the lord or the state. They can be understood only in the context of peasant society, and as proto-revolutionaries.

This theory may work well when applied to the haiduk of Bulgaria or other European rebel groups, but its application to American bandits caused several historians to raise their voices in protest. Hobsbawm evidently knows a good deal more about Bulgaria than he does about Missouri, then and now a hotbed of capitalist energies, where there were no peasants to champion, even had Jesse James been so inclined. There were certainly slaves who needed help—six at least in the James household; but Jesse was very far from wishing to champion slaves. In fact, he spent much of his short life trying to kill people who wanted to help the slaves. Even in the late 1870s, when the end was in sight and the violence that he had dispensed was less and less susceptible to any military interpretation, Jesse rushed with his brother Frank and the Younger boys into the catastrophe of the Northfield, Minnesota raid largely because he wanted to rob a bank in which the Union hero and strong civil rights proponent Adelbert Ames had his money.

As this patient biography makes clear, violence came to Jesse James more or less with his mother's milk. He was born in Clay County, Missouri, in an atmosphere of sectional conflict. His father died in the California gold rush; one stepfather was hanged in the backyard, although not fatally; his thrice-married mother Zerelda was no pacifist. From the late 1840s to the mid-1870s, Missouri was one of the most violent places in America, neighbor fighting neighbor, often over the issue of slavery. And Lee's surrender to Grant had no effect on this regional violence.

When Stiles, in his subtitle, calls Jesse James the "last rebel of the Civil War," he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse's life. From the age of fifteen on, he saw himself as a Confederate; he always looked South. In western Missouri, where he raided and fought, the Civil War was no mere four-year affair. Even as late as ten years after the surrender Jesse felt enraged because so few people were willing to go on fighting. His war was a partisan war, his life a partisan life, a matter of small skirmishes, twenty men here against another twenty men there. He never saw the devastation of Richmond or Atlanta, never felt the force of Grant or Sherman. The pro-slavers and the abolitionists had been fighting in Missouri since the 1840s, and the Emancipation Proclamation did not end it. The sociologist Lonnie Athens speaks of a process of "violentization" in which people see so much killing that finally only the ability to kill seems worthy of respect. My own Missouri-born grandparents lived not far from where James lived, in his time. After the conclusion of the Civil War they waited a few years, hoping that the killing would die down, but it didn't, and so they packed up and moved to Texas.

The face of the dust wrapper of Stiles's book—Jesse James at sixteen, during his first summer under arms—is the face of a true believer. What Jesse believed in was the Confederate cause, and he allowed no hint of moderation to temper his commitment, his anger, his thirst for revenge. In 1864, he rode with Bloody Bill Anderson and Archie Clement, men as vicious as any who ever fought on American soil. Bloody Bill seems to have been a small-scale American version of the terrible Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who ravished Mongolia and the Soviet Far East after World War I. Jesse James was with Anderson when the Centralia Massacre took place. Twenty-four unarmed Union soldiers were taken off a train, shot, and mutilated, with others treated just as badly in the town itself. Both Anderson and Clement frequently scalped their victims. In his eagerness to avenge Bloody Bill's death, once he had been ambushed, Jesse rushed into Gallatin, Missouri and promptly killed the wrong man, a pillar of the community named John W. Sheets. It was not the last time that he would kill inaccurately, and in haste.

From the mid-1860s on through the 1870s, Jesse had the help of a propagandist, a former Confederate major named John Newman Edwards, who switched to journalism and did all he could to promote Jesse as a kind of rebel knight errant. I own a dime novel, not written by Edwards, called Jesse James Knight Errant or the Rescue of the Queen of Prairies, in which Jesse performs many casual heroics in a place called the Vale of Pecos. Edwards's propagandizing consisted in the main of attempts to make Jesse's robbing and killing the legitimate responses of a patriot to Southern grievances. His efforts were greatly helped by a blundering Pinkerton raid in 1874; Jesse's mother lost an arm, but eight-year-old Archie, her pet child, lost his life. After 1875, however, it became increasingly difficult, even for a skilled propagandist such as Edwards, to put a convincing political spin on Jesse's raiding. Missourians, having endured some thirty years of Afghan-like violence, were tiring of it. Jesse's claims rang ever more hollow. His loyal younger brother Frank would rather have spent his time farming, and even Jesse's patient wife Zee hankered for a little peace.

In 1880 Thomas Crittenden, a Unionist Democrat, was elected governor of Missouri, and much of his inaugural address was a declaration of war on the outlaws. He persuaded the railroading interests that banditry was costing them money. Almost immediately Jesse played into the governor's hands by robbing a train and killing the conductor—one of his few killings that was probably accidental. The railroads immediately ponied up: Crittenden was soon able to offer a $10,000 reward for both Jesse James and Frank James, dead or alive. The Ford boys, Robert and Charley, saw their chance. They ingratiated themselves with Jesse, waiting patiently if nervously for a moment when he might be unarmed. It came on a hot day in April 1882, when Jesse threw off his coat, vest, and gun belt and stepped up on a chair to dust a picture. Bob Ford immediately killed him with a shot to the head.

Bandit biography has always been a taxing genre, in which every assertion is sure to draw many challenges. How much did Henry Fielding get right when he wrote his book about the highwayman Jonathan Wild? Newspapers always devote lavish coverage to the exploits of bandits, but how much bandit journalism is really accurate? When gun battles happen, legend encrusts the corpses before they are even cold. Who can say with absolute precision what was the sequence of events in the shootout between the Earps and the Clantons at the O.K. Corral? Inevitably there will be pretenders, claimants, even denials that the outlaws are really dead. More than a century after Bob Ford shot Jesse James off that chair, DNA testing confirmed his death— but there were some who still believed that he had died some years earlier, in Denton County, Texas. Butch Cassidy might have ended his days in Spokane, Washington, rather than in Bolivia; the Sundance Kid may have made it back to Idaho. Some citizens of Hico, Texas believe that Billy the Kid fooled Pat Garrett and enjoyed a long dotage in their community. Meanwhile Billy's headstone, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, has been stolen at least twice.

Gun battles and robberies are often disorderly affairs: it is not easy for even a careful historian to determine who shot whom. Stiles is rightly cautious on this score. James wrote a famous letter to the Kansas City Times on a matter close to his heart: uncooperative bank employees. "A man who's a d....d enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when covered with a pistol ought to die," he reasons; and he goes on to expand on those sentiments. Does this allow us to conclude that it was Jesse who killed the honest but uncooperative banker Joseph Heywood in Northfield, Minnesota? I feel sure that it was Jesse, but "almost certainly" is as far as Stiles will go—and either conclusion will probably cause this magazine to receive impassioned letters defending the opposite view.

In the hierarchy of American outlaws—if one judges solely on the extent of their bibliographies—Billy the Kid is still far ahead of Jesse James. Billy died without knowing who killed him and slid right into myth. Jesse's immense popularity in his native place—a place with a good deal more social and political density than Billy's New Mexico—owed much of its potency to the intense regional resentment of Yankee power. But Jesse James was no Robin Hood; nor was he even nice. Yet he certainly was defiant, and in the Missouri of his day, defiance rocked.

Variety Accidentally Announces that Jean Gabin is Starring in a New Film!

2008-10-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

French/Senegalese Rapper, MC Jean Gabin took his name from French movie star Jean Gabin.

On Friday October 24th, Variety erroneously reported the release of a brand new movie starring "the French thesp Jean Gabin!"

Apparently, nobody told the journalist, Elsa Kelassy, that Jean Gabin died thirty-two years ago, in 1976.

What Kelassy should have written, is that the new film, director Pierre Lafargue's "Black" stars the French rapper McJeanGab1 (pronounced MC Jean Gabin), who took his professional name from the (deceased) French movie thesp, Jean Gabin.

Even though it would be completely awesome if Jean Gabin could come back to life and make one more movie -- he'd be 104 this year -- that probably won't happen!

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117994582.html?categoryid=19&cs=1

Jean Gabin and Salvador Dali

2008-09-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

For the entire time I was writing my new two-volume book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, I was trying to find a photograph of Jean Gabin and Salvador Dali together.

After all, Dali directed the incredible "drunk sequence" which happens about 15 minutes into Gabin's amazing 1942 noir, Moontide.
Of course, a picture like that never showed up... until today!

Here are Jean Gabin and Salvador Dali together, in Paris, in 1972, thirty years after the making of Moontide.

The World's Coolest Movie Star and The World's Coolest Surrealist -- together in one room. Submitted for your approval.

www.jeangabinbook.com

(PS, years ago, I saw a great still of Jean Gabin and John Garfield laughing it up as they wash dishes together in the kitchen of the Hollywood Canteen, circa 1942. If anybody happens to have it, let me know at author@jeangabinbook.com, and I will post it on this blog-site. Relatedly, if you happen to have any personal Jean Gabin anecdotes -- maybe you met him or your grandmother saw him crossing a street somewhere -- please tell me about it, and I'll post it on this site, as well...)

Meet Little "Grisbi" -- The First Dog Named After a Jean Gabin Movie!

2008-09-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Hey, everybody:

Who's this scrappy little fella?

Meet Grisbi -- he's a five-month-old pug!

An audience member who attended this past weekend's Jean Gabin Film Festival at the American Cinematheque, here in Los Angeles, was so impressed by the actor's great 1954 gangster movie Touchez pas au grisbi, that she went home and immediately named her newly-acquired five-month-old pug "Grisbi!" (The word 'grisbi' is French slang, meaning 'loot,' and the film's title, Touchez pas au grisbi, translates, in English, as Hands Off the Loot.)

Now, "Grisbi" is not only a great movie... it's a great dog!

www.jeangabinbook.com

Successful Jean Gabin Festival at the American Cinematheque!

2008-09-10T16:59:00.001-07:00
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Thank you for everybody who attended this past weekend's two-night Jean Gabin Film Festival at the American Cinematheque! It was great!

The crowd (almost sold-out the first night; almost three-quarters-full the second night) loved all four of the movies -- SICILIAN CLAN, MOONTIDE, LE PORT DU DESIR (HOUSE BY THE WATERFRONT), and TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, and a lot of people came up to me at the end of both evenings and asked me when the next Gabin Festival would be -- anyway, I hope to announce another one in the very near future.

I met a lot of people who told me some great Gabin Anecdotes that I didn't know about, and one lady (she looked to be about 90), who was bundled up in a fur coat and giant sunglasses, told me that she "met Gabin at Fox, in '42." One man told me that Gabin's 1970 action flick "La Horse" was released in the US (I didn't know it was) as "The Farm," but I haven't been able to check up on that tidbit yet... In fact, when Susan King interviewed me a couple of days before the festival for the Los Angeles Times, she told me that when she was a little girl, her parents took her to see a Doris Day movie called "The Glass Bottom Boat," and the co-feature it was released with -- back in the old days of 'double features' -- was "Melodie en sous-sol" ("Any Number Can Win"), and that she remembers entering the theater during the finale of that great Gabin/Delon picture.

All that, plus Helen Mirren was in the audience for Evening #2 (everybody saw her except for me, since 'this author' is completely oblivious to everything on earth), and I sold a lot of copies of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN.

Anyway -- that's all for now! Thanks to everybody who made WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR WEEKEND at the American Cinematheque a great success.

PS: I just read today that John Woo is developing a re-make of THE SICILIAN CLAN for 20th Century Fox -- the studio which made the original film.

www.jeangabinbook.com

Another Gabin Gem Makes Its Way to U.S. DVD!

2008-09-06T16:45:00.001-07:00

Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan on the set of director Jean Gremillon's "Remorques" (1939/1941).

Last month I announced the arrival of two Gabin movies on DVD -- Gabin's 1942 film "Moontide," out via Fox Video, and director Max Ophuls' anthology/tryptych from 1952, "Le Plaisir," on Criterion.

Well, a third hard-to-find Gabin classic has just been released quietly via a smaller label: It's director Jean Gremillion's outstanding Remorques, the literal title of which is "Tugboats" and the US title of which is Stormy Waters. Directed by the vastly underrated Poetic Realist Jean Gremillon, Remorques was filmed in 1939, and released in France in 1941. (The reason for the delayed release is that, about 90% into the film's production, Gabin was conscripted into the French Navy and had to take a year off from completing his scenes.)

The harrowing, fantastic, and relatively unknown (in America) Remorques is the last of the dark/heart-rending Poetic Realist films pictures in which Gabin starred in the late '30s, the moody 'tragic drifter' period during which he also made Quai des brumes, La Bete humaine, and Le Jour se leve, which are similar to Remorques in tone -- and this one is equally as good. It re-teams Gabin with Michele Morgan for the third time, after 1938's Le Recif corail and 1939's Le Quai des brumes, and the ending is so haunting, it's one of those rare films where, when it's over, you won't be able to get up for a few minutes. It's that great.

In Remorques, Gabin plays a disillusioned (when is he not?) tugboat captain, who's thrown over his physically ill wife in favor of a fetching stranger, played by Michele Morgan (who wouldn't do that)?

The title was originally released on VHS in the '80s by the now defunct Video Yesteryear, and a new retailer has purchased the rights to the entire Video Yesteryear catalog, and is selling the Video Yesteryear films, including Remorques, mostly through eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/STORMY-WATERS-Remorques-DVD_W0QQitemZ130157854085QQihZ003QQcategoryZ617QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1638Q2em118Q2el1247

The Video Yesteryear copy of Remorques is dubbed into English, it's shorter than the uncut French version (which is, in fact, better) and it hasn't been restored like many of Gabin's other films have -- but until the day that Remorques gets the Criterion treatment, if you're a Gabin completist, you'll definitely want to make this version of the picture a part of your collection.