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

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)

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

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!

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

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.)

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

"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)

Michele Morgan vs. Qatar!

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

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.

Happy 75th Birthday, Brigitte Bardot!

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!


object width="560" height="340">
Trailer for En cas de malheur, starring Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot
www.jeangabinbook.com

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

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!

Happy Bastille Day from Jean Gabin Book.com!

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 Book, Wins Two Book Awards in 2009

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.

57 Minutes into Pepe Le Moko

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

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

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

An Email from France's Minister of Culture

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.

Larry McMurtry: Jean Gabin Fan!

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.

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.

JOSEPHINE BAKER, JEAN GABIN'S CO-STAR IN "ZOU-ZOU" (1934) HONORED WITH U.S. POSTAGE STAMP

Josephine Baker, the legendary American performer who starred opposite Jean Gabin in a great French film, 1934's "Zou-zou," was honored in her home country yesterday with her very own postage stamp!

FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS:

New US postage stamps honor early black cinema
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Josephine Baker looks straight at you with bright eyes and shining smile, fearless and demanding attention.
The time is 1935, and the St. Louis native who transfixed France and much of Europe with song and dance stares out from a poster advertising the film "Princess Tam-Tam." Baker starred as a simple African woman presented to Paris society as royalty.

Baker's movie is one of five recalled on a set of U.S. postage stamps being released Wednesday to honor vintage black cinema. Ceremonies marking the sale of the stamps will be held at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, which is holding a black film festival.
"So many things happened in her life that she had never expected," her son Jean-Claude Baker said Tuesday.

"I guess that if she was with us today she would be very honored. At her death she was a French citizen, but she never forgot she was born in America," he said in a telephone interview. "She would be delighted and very moved."
"Despite all the difficulty of colored people in her time, she triumphed over all the adversity that she and her people had to endure," he added.
Another poster, for a 1921 release, provides a taste of the racial divide that sent the young Baker to Europe to pursue her career.

"The Sport of the Gods," the poster proclaims, is based on a book by Paul Laurence Dunbar, "America's greatest race poet," and it adds that the film has "an all-star cast of colored artists."
Other posters in the set of 42-cent stamps are:
_ "Black and Tan," a 19-minute film released in 1929 featuring Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra.
_ "Caldonia," another short at 18 minutes, which was released in 1945. It showcased singer, saxophonist and bandleader Louis Jordan.
_ "Hallelujah," a 1929 movie released by MGM. It was one of the first films from a major studio to feature an all-black cast. Producer-director King Vidor was nominated for an Academy Award for his attempt to portray rural African-American life, especially religious experience.
In addition to Jean-Claude Baker and his brother, Jarry, the ceremony was scheduled to include Louis Jordan's widow, Martha Jordan; Paul Ellington, grandson of Duke Ellington; Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker; and Gloria Hopkins Buck, chairwoman of the film festival.

Josephine Baker may be best remembered in the United States for her singing and dancing in Europe, but she also earned military honors as an undercover agent for the French resistance in World War II. Later, she was active in civil rights work and appeared with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963.

http://www.jeangabinbook.com/

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES AND JEAN GABIN

Here's Jean Gabin signing an autograph in Santa Monica, California, August 1942.

In other news:
WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN was written about this month on Turner Classic Movies.com:

http://www.tcm.com/movienews/index/?cid=198507

Jean Gabin: The Five Cycles of His Film Career

When I started watching Jean Gabin's movies, in preparation for writing my two-volume book WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR: THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO, which will be released on July 20th, I was trying to figure out a good way to organize my information, and I decided that Gabin's movie career actually broke itself down -- and very neatly, I might add -- into five distinct periods, or cycles:


Volume One of my book concerns itself with the first Four of these Five Cycles:

During CYCLE ONE (1930-1933), a young Jean Gabin stars in his first 15 films. Here, he hasn't yet become cinedom's most famous somber/brooding tragic drifter, in fact, many of these (great) films are comedies and musicals, and none of them are known in the English-speaking world at all. Gabin, who was 26 to 29 years of age during this period, had just emerged from Paris's vaudeville stages, where he sang and danced -- and singing and dancing is what he does (and very well, I might add) during some of these movies. These films are all made in France.


CYCLE TWO (1934- 1941) is a cycle of 16 films in which Gabin played his famously-somber, brooding (yet life-loving!) tragic drifter character, and most of the films for which he is known today in the English-speaking world were made during this period. Grand Illusion, Pepe Le Moko, La Bete humaine, Le Jour se leve, Quai des brumes, and La Bas-fonds were all made during this period, and all of these exist in wonderful subtitled editions, mostly available from the Criterion Collection. These films are made in France.


There are only two films in CYCLE THREE (1942-1944): When Hitler invaded France, many of France's best filmmakers and actors moved to the United States where they continued their film careers in American movies, made for the major Hollywood studios. Gabin made two films during this period -- the only American movies he ever made, and the only movies which he ever made in the English language -- and even though these are American movies, they are almost completely unknown today in the United States: In Moontide (20th Century-Fox, 1942), Gabin is a French sailor who washes up in a Southern California port, where friends (Claude Raines) and lovers make his life fun, and a stark-raving psycho (Thomas Mitchell) tries to ruin that fun. Impostor (Universal Pictures, 1944) is an up-to-the-minute World War II tale in which Gabin joins the Free French Army and goes up against the Axis in the Belgian Congo (and the Belgian Congo scenes were shot in Toluca Lake, California)! In his two American films, Gabin continues to play the brooding tragic drifters whom he had played in his famous French films, from 'Cycle Two.'


Volume One of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR ends with CYCLE FOUR (1946-1953): In 1943, after making his two American films, Jean Gabin returned to France. He spent two years fighting for his country in the Free French Navy (in fact, he was a much-decorated tank commander!), and when the war ended, he made 12 more great movies. This is kind of a transitional period for Jean Gabin: In some of the films, he plays his usual tragic drifter character, and in others, now that he is older, he plays, for the first time, a gentleman-gangster or a businessman. The French public kind of turned on Gabin during this period and didn't come out to see these films, feeling that Gabin had deserted them during the War -- they felt that he was having "fun" in America, while they were dealing with the scourge of Nazism. (Zero of the films made during this period are known in the English-speaking world, and all of them are either French, or else French-Italian co-productions.)

***

Next, comes Volume Two of my book: The entirety of Volume Two deals with Cycle Five, the final cycle of Jean Gabin's career. During this period (1954-1976), Jean Gabin makes 48 of his 95 films. While he's just as quiet and brooding (and cool) as ever during this period, here, his characters have ventured over to the other side of the social spectrum. Back in the 1930s, he played the ultimate working-class tragic drifter. Now, while he's still quiet, solemn, and brooding, he'll usually play a wealthy magnate, a patriarch, or a smooth criminal gentleman-gangster, who's a kind of proto-Michael Corleone. During this fifth and final Cycle of Jean Gabin's movie career, the French finally "forgave" him, once again making him their country's biggest star, and turning out for all of his movies. Outside of two movies -- 1954's Touchez pas au grisbi (directed by Jacques Becker) and 1955's Moulin-Rouge epic French Cancan (directed by Jean Renoir), none of the movies in which Gabin made during this period are known by the vast majority of English-speaking cineastes.

Hopefully, one of these days, the English-speaking world will know what the rest of the world has already known: Jean Gabin is THE WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR.

http://www.jeangabinbook.com/