Mélodie en sous-sol

1963, France, directed by Henri Verneuil

A weaker entry in the Gabin canon, though never without interest, not least as the first of three films uniting Gabin with Alain Delon, cast very much as the youthful rebel. The opening, set in under-construction Sarcelles, is quite fascinating, with Gabin's character returning from prison to a transformed landscape; the oppressive effect of the new construction is reminiscent of the tone of Gabin's slightly later, and much more challenging, Le Chat, set against a similar background. While the locations in the opening going make a real impact, the subsequent blend of location and studio shooting is very rough-edged, with the studio sets so obviously artificial.

Touchez pas au grisbi

1953, France, directed by Jacques Becker

One of the true marvels of the French gangster genre, with its own codes and conventions, quite different to the American counterparts -- impossible to imagine the wonderful scene of two men sharing a late-night sandwich, never mind the subsequent scene when they brush their teeth, in an American movie of the period. As magnetic as Gabin was in the pre-war years, he's rarely been as magnificent as on this occasion -- every moment he's offscreen you sense his influence, even with the wonderful supporting cast (Dary, Ventura, Moreau, Frankeur and more).

Deux hommes dans la ville

1973, France/Italy, directed by José Giovanni

The final film featuring both Gabin and Delon, with the older star ceding much of the running time to his younger, though already established, counterpart; indeed, Gabin is offscreen for a great deal of the film, which focuses on Delon's character, recently released from prison and attempting to go straight (Gabin plays his parole officer). Gabin is in peak avuncular mode, the éminence grise who has seen it all, though even then he doesn't have Delon's special line in world-weariness. The film is blunt on the impact of prison and the challenges of rehabilitation, though director José Giovanni had his own complex, up-close relationship to the institution of incarceration -- he willingly collaborated with the German occupation, and was involved in various gangland activities, ending up in prison for more than eleven years before beginning his second act as a novelist and filmmaker while carefully occluding the less savoury details of his past. While the film is ultimately less profound than Giovanni would like us to believe, some of the details on the French legal system are piquant, while Gérard Depardieu and Bernard Giraudeau make notable early appearances.

Maigret tend un piège

1958, France, directed by Jean Delannoy

The first of Gabin's outing as Maigret, and the strongest of the trio -- certainly more distinctive than Gilles Grangier's routine contribution, which used Gabin well but did little more.  Delannoy, by contrast, creates a strong sense of atmosphere, particularly emphasizing the claustrophobia of the corner of Paris being terrorized by the events of the film. More surprising is the mobility of his camera, especially in the early stages of the film -- elegant movements that create neat moments of visual shorthand, while also, on occasion, underpinning the sense of menace felt by the characters. The film's a fine example of Gabin's ability to seamlessly play both sides of the law in this period: there's not a great deal of difference between his Maigret and, say, Max from Touchez pas au grisbi, with both characters elegant, methodical, and willing to pause to savour a decent sandwich.

French Cancan

1955, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir reunites with Gabin after a fifteen-year gap, with the actor in a classic later-period Gabin role, roguish yet charming, and almost startling in the rich colours that Renoir employs. Though French in its frame of reference -- the songs, the locations -- there's an echo of classic Hollywood putting-on-a-show spectaculars, albeit with an air of melancholy that's entirely specific to Renoir's film (the wonderful scene where Gabin relaxes backstage, satisfied that things have come together but fully aware the public has no need to see him).

Quai des brumes

1938, France, directed by Marcel Carné (aka Port of Shadows)

A film I hadn't seen since college, and it blew me away to see it again now -- the intensity of feeling, the gorgeous photography, the use of sets with a judicious addition of location shooting, Gabin at his pre-war peak, the quite extraordinary support from Simon, Morgan, Brasseur, Le Vigan, and perhaps most of all the willingness to allow scenes to build and build (several of the sequences are exceptionally extended, quite rare in modern cinema except in something like Tarantino's deliberately affected approach). 

En cas de malheur

1958, France, directed by Claude Autant-Lara

Based on a novel by Simenon and scripted by the legendary Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, though it's hardly a career highlight either in behind or in front of the camera (Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot, both of whom are barely stretched by their roles, are the focus on the latter side). The film comes across as something like a 1950s French version of The Woman in the Window or The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, without the restrictions of the American Production Code, though the sourness of the end does suggest a more interesting film could have been crafted by a director less self-consciously provocative than Autant-Lara.

Les Grandes familles

1958, France, directed by Denys de la Patellière

One of Gabin's more patrician roles -- as formal, in many ways, as his turn in Le Président some years later --  with the actor playing a tough-nosed paterfamilias/CEO, whose rigidity has troubling consequences for those around him (though Gabin  didn't always play lovable parts, this character is unusually uncompromising). It takes the film a few minutes to find its feet: the initial tone confused me greatly, as it implied a rather more comic film than was to follow. Bernard Blier also has a fine role as Gabin's factotum. 

Gas-oil

1955, France, directed by Gilles Grangier

A fine Gabin/Gilles Grangier collaboration, with some dialogue from the pen of Michel Audiard (Gabin gets a few pearls, very nicely delivered). Gabin is a truck driver -- as in the following year's much bleaker Des gens sans importance -- who inadvertently comes to the attention of some gangland figures, with Jeanne Moreau as his love interest. Gabin's role hearkens back to some of his most iconic working-man parts and it's not hard to see his character as an evolution of that of La Belle équipe, while the overall picture of the trucker's life is filled with enjoyable vignettes of working class/small town life in central France. 

Gueule d'amour

1937, France, directed by Jean Grémillon

No great surprise that I liked this a lot: Gabin, Grémillon, 1930s. To my great surprise, though, I discovered afterwards that it was filmed in Germany, like Grémillon's later L'Etrange Monsieur Victor, though in 1937 this was a good deal less unpopular in terms of audience perceptions. The extent to which this telegraphs the postwar Gabin persona is quite fascinating -- he manages to occupy both the handsome young buck and embittered older man within a single, quite brief film. The film taps into that vein of poetic tragedy that so marked the French 1930s, though the finale is more brutal than I expected, perhaps again foreshadowing what was to come in the postwar years.

La Marie du port

1950, France, directed by Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné takes the helm of a film that in many respects establishes the post-war Gabin persona -- world-weary, still magnetic but with the years having taken their toll, and less laconic than an American tough guy might have been. Although Gabin was only in his mid-40s at this stage, you'd take him for a man in his 60s, and indeed the film is based on the idea that he's an older, successful business man (who owns a cinema among other things, which allows for the occasional, quite fascinating glimpse into the workings of a small picture house). The film doesn't reach the heights of Carné's pre-war and wartime work, though there are certainly passages that recall the best of the collaborations with Prévert, and Gabin is excellent -- very much the focus of the film both visually and emotionally.

Le Soleil des voyous

1967, France/Italy, directed by Jean Delannoy

Another Gabin film, this time partnered with Robert Stack; Stack grew up partly in France and his French, though accented, is impeccable (he speaks in French throughout). The picture is an old buddies/one-last-big-heist affair, with a great deal of emphasis on the procedural detail (justified in part by the presentation of Gabin's character as an especially meticulous planner). Goes down easy, but not especially noteworthy despite a solid if strictly to type performance from Gabin. A few intriguing bits of location backdrop, nonetheless.

Des gens sans importance

1956, France, directed by Henri Verneuil

A compelling, moody picture, from Henri Verneuil, one of the strongest directors to work with Gabin in the later period (the actor made plenty of weak films, but the Gabin-Verneuil pairing was a notable success, also yielding Un Singe en hiver and Le Président). Gabin is at the limits of the taciturn here, somehow managing to navigate life largely surrounded by silence despite his work and garrulous family. Indeed, on a number of occasions he refers to the (pleasing?) silence of his job, driving across France in a series of apparently interminable journeys (Verneuil's ability to convey the monotony without boring the audience is quite the trick -- reminded me, perhaps incongruously, of Raymond Bernard's extended dramatization of the pounding of artillery in Les Croix de bois). The film also struck me as being especially modern in the sense that it anticipates the nouvelle vague -- location shooting, characters who are not always admirable, a great deal of sensitivity to tone, even if structurally there's no innovation.

Voici le temps des assassins

1956, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

A successful reunion for Gabin and Duvivier, who had not worked together since 1936. Like most of Gabin's more successful post-war turns, he's in buttoned-down mode (at least emotionally -- the character is not an especially silent type). Gabin plays a chef in Les Halles whose life is upended by the arrival of a quasi-relative, resulting in a profound change in circumstances (and in tone). The restaurant scenes are especially enjoyable -- not only does Duvivier make terrific use of the restaurant set to stage deep-focus action, but there's a vivid sense of the running of the business, with a cast of regular customers and an agreeably brisk rhythm. The film blends sets and location work very successfully, too. 

Archimède le clochard

1959, France, directed by Gilles Grangier

Gabin was a remarkably busy actor in the 1950s, turning out an average of three films a year, not all of the first rank. Truffaut had a point when characterizing Gabin's level of influence over films as being "dangerous," especially when he is paired with a director of no particular strength, as is the case for Gilles Grangier, who made a dozen films with the star. Gabin plays the titular tramp, a "character" who objects to being imprisoned on a short sentence since he'd much rather spend the cold months in lockup. There's nothing subtle about Gabin's characterization, which is "big" in every sense, with drunken hijinks, rapid-fire patter, and even a little soft-shoe. The film's main interest comes from the support, even if it isn't always used to best effect -- Julien Carette as a fellow tramp, and Bernard Blier as a bar owner, in particular. There's a dispiriting cheapness to proceedings most notably in the pretty inept integration of location and studio footage in a sequence purportedly on the fringes of a big Parisian parade. 

La Vérité sur Bébé Donge

1952, France, directed by Henri Decoin

Another fine film from Henri Decoin, an emotionally brutal tale drawn from a Simenon novel, which begins with a man on his deathbed, in full knowledge that his wife has put him there by means of a poisoned cup of coffee. I haven't read the source novel and while other commentators suggest the book was gutted I don't think you have to look very far to find the author's underlying cynicism about human relations, particularly within relationships, in full flower (Maigret's tender relationship with his wife is the obvious exception in the oeuvre). Although Decoin is no Clouzot, he finds some of the same bone-dry spirit here at times and does an especially fine job in suggesting the depths underneath the facades of both Gabin and Darrieux; Gabin's usual charm is smartly upended through the repeated suggestion that he uses his magnetism entirely thoughtlessly for his own gratification. This film marked Darrieux's "turn" toward less admirable characters -- her 1930s films are pretty lightweight, and these days it's her 1950s films that people turn to most often, especially the Ophuls films.

Un Singe en hiver

1962, France, directed by Henri Verneuil

A meeting-of-the-generations picture, the only time that Gabin appeared with Belmondo, the most iconic actor of the New Wave, and their distinctly different styles work very well here: Gabin's mostly disciplined technique -- there's a good deal to Farran Smith Nehme's comment that Gabin lets the action come to him, both in the film she's discussing and in his broader career -- contrasts with Belmondo's bundle of nervous energy, although one of the film's great pleasures is the way that the two quite different actors move toward the centre as their characters develop an unlikely friendship. The pair seem to have an entirely unforced camaraderie onscreen, though Belmondo suggested in an interview that Gabin barely spoke to him when he wasn't delivering a line; the magic of the movies, indeed. Verneuil is not an especially innovative director, but he did have a fine sense of how long to allow a scene to play out, and the set pieces are especially well-calibrated -- drunken antics can easily become tiresome, whether onscreen or off, and Verneuil knows just when to cut away to the next scene while still indulging our desire to see the actors play broad strokes. After the fun, the ending is surprisingly poignant -- something of a rueful hangover and yet invested with a great deal of affection.

Le Chat

1971, France, directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre

A brutal film that has virtually no violence -- though animal lovers should beware -- as Gabin and Signoret embody the daily realities of a marriage that has long-since collapsed into a horrible kind of co-dependent enmity. At one point, Gabin flicks a folded-up piece of paper at Signoret in lieu of more civilized communication, but it feels as though he has delivered a slap. Both actors are in fine form, navigating a horrible kind of waltz around each other, both within the home that seems increasingly small and on the streets of the compact neighborhood where they can't help but cross paths. The neighborhood, on the western fringes of Paris, functions as an effective metaphor for the collapsing relationship: the film was made right at the time when entire quartiers were being razed to make room for the edifices of La Défense, and the background construction creates a maddening modernist soundtrack.

L'Année sainte

1976, US, directed by Jean Girault

This is a contribution to the fifth annual Late Show blogathon, hosted, as ever, by David Cairns at Shadowplay.

The final card in many careers is a dispiriting one: there really aren't that many people who go out on a genuine high, and Jean Girault's lightweight comic fable about two escaped prisoners disguised as members of the clergy was never likely to restore Gabin to the glories of old. In truth, the actor seemed to have been playing out the string for more than a decade by the time the end came. The 1970 Simenon adaptation Le Chat, starring opposite Simone Signoret, was one of his best postwar films, as Gabin himself recognized, but it's a rare highlight for the period after 1963, which marked the close of the second great phase of his career (perhaps not quite as glorious as the pre-war phase, but fine nonetheless, with even the lesser films brisk and well-constructed and with Gabin still magnetic despite the advance of middle age).

The saddest thing about L'Année sainte is how diminished everything seems. Gabin had been convincing in roles far beyond his years since at least the early 1960s where the role called for it -- he's quite brilliant as the apparently retired politician of Le Président, for instance -- but here he is very visibly decrepit himself. The sequence where the camera lingers on him as he struggles with a a set of stairs would seem almost cruel if had been shot by a more skilled director, whereas in Girault's case I suspect that it just didn't occur to him to do anything more creative.

Gabin was never an especially vain actor onscreen -- he makes no attempt to conceal his jowled face or his ample belly in something like Un Singe en hiver, playing opposite Belmondo in his absolute prime -- but the passage of time never seemed like a distraction in such roles, and in many films he projected a continued energy that belied his chronological age, with the decisive, overbearing farmer of La Horse perhaps the exemplar in terms of his later career, although he shows quite the turn of speed in Un Singe en hiver when running from exploding fireworks.

But Gabin is only a symptom of the larger malaise, in which the overall cheapness of the enterprise is revealed by the frequent shots of an airplane with obviously different logos depending on whether it is shown in flight (in the livery of the fictional Air Italia) or taking off (when it's interchangeably a Pan Am 'plane and a KLM airliner). Such technicalities wouldn't seem so significant except that they are so glaring, as if to signal that the filmmakers have virtually nothing invested in their product.

The same is true of the appearance of the glorious Danielle Darrieux. There's no real reason for her character to exist since she barely contributes to the plotline, but once the filmmakers invent her they barely trouble themselves actually do anything meaningful with the actress, one brief, nostalgic scene between Gabin and Darrieux perhaps excepted.

As with half a dozen of his later films, Gabin shares the lead with a much younger actor, on this case Jean-Claude Brialy, although unlike Gabin's film with Belmondo or the several pictures he made with Alain Delon, Brialy is mostly called on to react to Gabin rather than to do much of interest himself. It was hardly the most glorious of decades for Brialy, either: he made very few films during the 1970s, after a great run from the late 1950s through the end of the subsequent decade, and this is at best a forgettable entry in his filmography, though the line where Gabin summarily rejects a third cellmate on the basis that he's gay acquires a certain frisson from the knowledge that Brialy was comfortably out far earlier than many actors.

It's tempting to read a greater degree of meaning into some of the other lines, too, particularly Darrieux's comments about having known Gabin's character in his pre-war glory, while there are perhaps allusions to Gabin's mortality -- nothing too surprising, given that he had suffered from health issues for several years, and indeed hadn't made a film for a couple of years by the time this opportunity came along. If the film doesn't mark a glorious ending to Gabin's career, it does at least have an amusing finale, and Gabin gets to deliver the payoff line with a flash of the old energy that made him so compelling across four decades.

Incidentally, Jean Girault has his own Late Films story, as something of a career-ending specialist: he died during the filming of Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes, the fifth and final entry in that series of astonishingly popular films that starred Louis de Funès, which also became de Funès's last picture since the actor died a few months later. De Funès marks roughly the edge of the boundary of my enthusiasm for French popular culture: he's an actor whose appeal often eludes me, especially when he is not paired with another, less rubber-faced performer (he was excellent with Gabin and Bourvil in La Traversée de Paris, though). His final film was hugely popular in its year of release, but I could barely make it past the half hour mark, blogathon or not.

Razzia sur la chnouf

1955, France, directed by Henri Decoin

A tough, and tough-minded, film -- laconic in its brutality, and once you've seen the ending, deeply unsettling in its view of right and wrong. Gabin is at the height of his postwar powers, entirely convincing as the gangster taking over a drug operation after a previous operator proved disloyal to the boss, and dealing with the unpredictable men charged with dispensing violent internal justice (most notably Lino Ventura, who is mostly called on to be a distilled version of the carved-from-stone type he played so frequently in those years). This is the strongest work I've seen from Henri Decoin, both in terms of content and shadowy staging: the tone is more consistent than in any of the other Decoin films I've seen, and when the director slows the rhythm down it's with purpose, adding nuances of shade to Gabin's character in particular.