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

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!

Eastbound and Down: Jean Gabin Played a Trucker in Two Movies!

When you think about the great French movie star Jean Gabin, you think about the tragic drifter characters he used to play when he was La Bete humaine, or the smooth, white-haired patriarchs and gentleman-gangsters he often played when young, in movies like Quai des brumes, Le jour se leve, and La bete humaine, and he was older (in movies like Touchez pas au grisbi).

But did you know that Jean Gabin played a steely TRUCKER in two movies that were made in 1955 and 1956? If you're American, you don't, because neither of these two great movies were ever released in the United States, but if you're French, you know both of the films very well.

In 1956's Gas-Oil, Gabin plays trucker Jean Chape. When he accidentally runs over a man who's already dead, it turns out that the corpse was actually worth millions, and that a team of surly gangsters think, erroneously, that Chape has stolen the money off of the body. So they're after him. It's a really great movie, and it's the second and final time in which Gabin would appear opposite Jeanne Moreau, who appeared with him, the year before, in director Jacques Becker's Touches pas au grisbi. (In Grisbi, Moreau has a supporting role, but she's the female lead in Gas-Oil.)

In 1956's Des gens sans importance, Gabin is another fifty year old trucker; this time, we get a very smart movie about ageism, in which trucker Gabin falls in love with a woman thirty years his junior -- much to the detriment of his long (and unhappy) marriage. Henri Verneuil directed this great movie, which features a sublime harmonica score by Jean Weiner.

Maybe one of these days The Criterion Collection (or somebody!) will subtitle these two seminal Gabin works into English and releae them on DVD as a Trucker Gabin double feature. Until the day that happens, I'll continue to report to you, when I can, on other great Jean Gabin movies which were never subtitled into English, nor released in the United States.

Read about all of Jean Gabin's 95 movies in my book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, which may be ordered from www.jeangabinbook.com.

JEAN DELANNOY, DIRECTED SEVEN JEAN GABIN FILMS, DIES, AGE 100.

Filmmaker Jean Delannoy.

Sad news on the Jean Gabin Front:

On Thursday, June 19, 2008, the great French film director Jean Delannoy died in Guainville, France, at the age of 100.

While Delannoy, a distant relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is not well-known in the United States, he was one of France's premiere directors, and he directed Jean Gabin in seven great films: LA MINUTE DE VERITE (1952), CHIENS PERDUS SANS COLLIER (1955), MAIGRET TEND UN PIEGE (1958), MAIGRET ET L'AFFAIRE SAINT-FIACRE (1959), LE BARON DE L'ECLUSE (1960), and LE SOLEIL DES VOYOUS (1967, which teamed Jean Gabin with Robert Stack).

Here is Mr. Delannoy's obituary, from the Associated Press:

________________________________
French filmmaker Jean Delannoy dies at 100

PARIS (AP) — Classic French filmmaker Jean Delannoy, who adapted novels by Victor Hugo and Andre Gide and won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize in 1946, has died at age 100, officials said Thursday.

Delannoy died Wednesday at his home in Guainville, southwest of Paris, the local city hall said, without providing the cause of death.

Many of Delannoy's films, starring actors including Jean Gabin, Jean Marais and Michele Morgan, were French box office successes in the 1940s and 1950s.

But Delannoy's classic style went out of fashion in the 1960s, when he was derided by the more avant-garde New Wave filmmakers, including Francois Truffaut. The New Wave dubbed his movies "le cinema de papa."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy praised Delannoy for "devoting his life, with success, to his passion for art."

"More than just a great artist, he was a man of great intelligence, alert, pertinent and faithful in friendship," Sarkozy said in a statement.

Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Delannoy represented the "pure classic French style: a mix of refinement and depth inherited from his long companionship with literature."
Working with a script by Jean Cocteau, Delannoy revisited the Tristan and Isolde legend in 1943's "L'Eternel Retour" (Eternal Return.)

His 1946 film "La Symphonie Pastorale," adapted from a Gide novel, won Cannes' top prize. The film told the story of a blind orphan who falls in love with a married pastor.

Another of his films was "Notre Dame de Paris" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), an adaptation of Hugo's novel starring Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Quinn.

www.jeangabinbook.com