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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
