Le Plaisir (1952)

Max Ophuls’ movie was based on three stories by Guy de Maupassant about pleasure.

Le Masque
A masked young dandy goes to an ornate dance hall, where he finds a young woman to be his dance partner. When he faints from the exertion, a doctor is called. He discovers that the dandy’s mask hides his aged appearance. The doctor takes the old man home to his patient wife. She explains that her husband Ambroise used to attract the ladies who frequented the hairdresser salon where he worked, but in the space of two years, he lost his looks. He goes out in disguise in an attempt to recapture his youth.
La Maison Tellier
Julia Tellier, the well-respected madam of a small-town whorehouse, takes her girls on an outing to her brother’s village to attend the first communion of her niece. Her regular patrons are taken aback when they discover the whorehouse closed without explanation that Saturday night. One finally discovers a sign explaining the reason and is relieved. Julia’s brother, played by Jean Gabin, becomes infatuated with Rosa, one of her workers, and promises to visit next month.
Le Modèle
An artist falls in love with his model. Things are idyllic at first, but after living together for a while, they begin to quarrel constantly. Finally, he moves in with his friend. She eventually finds him, but he wants no more to do with her. He ignores her threat to jump from a window, and is so guilt-ridden when she does so immediately that he marries her.

Ophuls, like Ernst Lubitsch, and some of the other European directors knows how to present infidlity and movies based on sex, and somehow make them seem acceptable. If American directors covered the same themes, I don’t they could get away with it. The only American director who even comes close is Preston Sturges.

French Cancan (1954)

Called Only the French Can upon it’s release in France, this is fictionalized story of Charles Zidler and the founding of the Moulin Rouge.

Jean Gabin plays Danglard, a man who lives to create great shows and great stars.

The movie opens with Danglard talking to some of his performers backstage. Danglard and some friends then go over to a lower class club, where he dances with a young girl and he thinks he can make her a star. When she does an old dance, the cancan, he begins to get ideas. Nini is only a washer woman, but she can really dance.

Like Renoir’s Rules of the Game, we see both the upper and the lower classes. Danglard may be from the upper classes, but the creditors are knocking at his door. Lola, Danglard’s beautiful mistress vows to stay with him. But Danglard is not ruled by money or by love, he just wants to have hits at the theater. He says: “Do Ilook like Prince Charming? Only one thing matters to me – what I create.”

Danglard goes to the other side of town and finds Nini. He tells her he wants her to dance for him. He then takes her to get trained by an old star of the CanCan.

Danglard somehow manages to buy the White Queen, where he first saw Nini,  He says that he will give them “A taste of the low life for millionaires. Adventure in comfort. Garden tables, the best champagne, great numbers by the finest artistes. The bourgeois will be thrilled to mix with our girls without fear of disease or getting knifed.”

In his Great Movies  review Roger Ebert said:

It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining. “Grand Illusion” and “Rules of the Game” are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be. But although “Rules” contains scenes of delightful humor, neither suggest the Renoir who made “Boulu Saved from Drowning” (1932), or “French Cancan” (1954), “French Cancan” a delicious musical comedy that deserves comparison with the golden age Hollywood musicals of the same period.

I thought this movie was so good. I think Roger is right in saying that Renoir is one of the great directors. I also think that Jean Gabin is on of the great actors of all time, and this movie helps to show off some of his talent.

Not as good as Singin in the Rain, but for me, not too far behind. The movie closes with a great twenty minute dance scene.

Moontide (1942)

Bobo (Jean Gabin) stars as a dock worker who thinks he may have killed a man while drunk the night before. Out on the beach he saves Anna (ida Lupino) who was trying to drown herself.

Soon Anna is living on the house boat with Bobo. But soon it is time for Bobo to take off. He says he is not a peasant, he is a gypsy, but Bobo soon returns.

When Anna sees Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) drunk, he tries to scare her away. He doesn’t like it that Bobo has taken up with her and has started to ignore him. Tiny tells her that Bobo may have killed someone.

When Anna asks Bobo about Tiny, he tells her that he blacks out and gets violent, and Tiny has helped him out. Bobo gives Tiny money so he won’t tell about things that happened in the past.

Bobo and Anna are getting married and Tiny isn’t happy. When they are alone he tries to extort her and then he makes a move on her. Anna figures out that it was Tiny that did the killing, not Bobo.Tiny strangles her and puts her in the hospital.

Bobo goes looking for Tiny.and Tiny runs off. Bobo tries to help him off aa ocean wall, but Bobo gets swept out to the sea,.Anna recovers and Bobo carries her off in his arms.

Two of the best character actors of all time, Thomas Mitchell and Claude Rains, also star, but the plot doesn’t do much with them.

Great actors, but the story wasn’t too good. it should have been so much better.

People of No Importance (1956)

Known in France as Des gens sans importance, this movie had Jean Gabin playing Jean Viard who becomes infatuated with a waitress, Clotilde, along his truck route. She is much too young, and much too pretty for him. His home life is depicted as being one constant fight with a wife who isn’t even happy to see him when he arrives home after a long trip. His daughter wants to be an actress and also spends most of their time together fighting.

At the truck station, the manager changes Jean’s route. He can tell where he has been stopping. Jean has promised Clo that he would be by, but now he can’t. He also doesn’t have a truck. While on the phone with Clo, the manager made his partner drive off alone. Jean hits the manager – twice. Jean can’t find a job. While out at dinner with his family, Clo comes to see him.

Clo gets a job as a maid in Parix at a whorehouse. Jean keeps talking about leaving his family but doesn’t seem to be able to do it. Jean’s daughter gets a hold of one of the letters that Clo wrote him, and reads it out loud to her mother. In the letter Clo says she is pregnent, something that Jean didn’t even know. Jean slaps his daughter and then tells his wife “i think I’m done here Solange’, as he walks out. He says goodbye to his two boys on the way out.

Noticing that sh is pregnant, Clo’s boss gives her an address and she comes out without the baby. Jean takes Clo on a truck job that he got, but Clo still hasn’t really recovered. Jean finally gets an ambulance for Clo, but she doesn’t make it. Jean goes back to his family.

La Bandera (1935)

Also known as Escape from Yesterday, the story starts with Pierre Gilieth, played by Jean Gabin, who having murdered a man in France, escapes to Spain. While he is there he has a tough time making a go of it so he joins the Spanish Foreign Legion.
He is pursued by Lucas, a memmer of the French secret police. Gilieth falls in love with and marries an Arabian dancing girl. Gilieth and Lucas are the last two survivors of a desert outpost under siege.
A very good movie with a young Jean Gabin showing great screen charisma.

The Lower Depths (1936)

Also know as Les bas-fonds, based on a play by Maxim Gorky, this is not one of Jean Renoir’s more highly regarded movies, but I really enjoy it. The great Jean Gabin plays a thief named Pepel who is in love with the flop house owner’s sister-in-law.
The movie explores the upstairs / downstairs lifestyles that Renoir is so fond of looking at. The people on the bottom floor may be poor but in some ways they were better off than those living above them.
Pepel in the midst of robbing a house meets the Baron, who is degenerate gambler. They sit down and have a last meal together, because the next day the creditor’s will be coming for all the Baron’s stuff.
The Baron, who was going to kill himself, decides to change his lifestyle and goes and lives in the flop house with Pepel.
Papel, who is also sick of his lifestyle, at the end of the movie leaves with Natacha to begin a new life.

The Grand Illusion (1937)

 

The Grand Illusion shows how well the upper classes from the different countries got along in the preWorld War I years.When the Germans and French officers get together it is almost like they are all members of the same club. Renoir, who pointed out the differences and similarities between the classes in The Rules of the Game, is up to it again.

One scene, that I found fascination, had the French prisoners looking sadly at the Germans singing “Die Wacht am Rhein”. When one of the French soldiers discovers in a newspaper article that the French had won a battle, the French spontaneously interrupt their cross dressing dance and break out singing “La Marseillaise”. What is interesting is that this same sequence of songs would again be used in Casablanca five years later.

Another interesting scene is the one in which Captain Rauffenstein, played by Eric von Stroheim, is entertaining Captain de Boeldieu. When Captain Boeldieu asks why he was invited Captain Rauffenstein says :

“Because your name is Boeldieu. Career office in the French Army. And I am Rauffenstein, career office in the German  Imperial Army.”
Captain Boeldieu : “But my comrades are officers as well.”
Captain Rauffenstein : “A Marechal and a Rosenthal, officers? ”
Captain Boeldieu : “They’re fine soldiers.”
Captain Rauffenstein : “Charming legacy of the French Revolution. ”
Captain Boeldieu : “Neither you nor I can stop the march of time.”
Captain Rauffenstein : “Boldieu, I don’t know who will win this war, but whatever the outcome, it will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus”.
Captain Boeldieu : “We’re no longer needed.”
Captain Rauffenstein : “Isn’t it a pity.”
Captain Boeldieu : “Perhaps.”

In the next scene Boeldieu sacrifices himself so the others can escape. As he lies dying he tells Rauffenstein that : “For a commoner, dying in a war is a tragedy. But for you and me, it’s a good way out.” The aristocrats know that WWI is going to end the type of society they had before and they are not looking forward to it.

Jean Gabin really didn’t have a very big part in this movie until after he escapes from the camp. Then the movie switches from being about class to being about the futility of war. The two escaped prisoners hold up on a farm with a German woman whose husband and brothers have been killed in the war. But, despite being different nationalities, they just see each other as people. As Jean and Elsa fall in love, Renoir shows us the world the way it should be. I guess it didn’t work – Germany invaded two years later.

Pepe le Moko (1937)

Probably Jean Gabin’s most iconic role. Remade in English the next year as Algiers with Charles Boyer playing the role of Pepe.

Pepe is a thief who is trapped in the double edged sword of the maze that is the Casbah in Morrocco. The police can’t capture Pepe in the protected beehive that he is in but Pepe can’t leave either. The police are under great pressure to capture this criminal who is becoming a living legend.

When a stylish Parisian beauty visits the Casbah, Pepe falls in love. I think he is in love with the idea of “Paris” and being outside of his self imposed cage as he is with the beauty, but fall he does. The woman is then used as bait to lure him out and Pepe falls in a big way.

Pepe is an influence on the American film noirs that were soon to follow. Great movie – a must see.

Port of Shadows (1938)

A year before he made Daybreak, Jean Gabin made Le quai des brumes, which was an even darker movie. In this Carne/Prevert film, Jean (played by Gabin) was not doomed from the start. He is looking to escape on a ship, but we don’t know why. Unfortunately for him, he meets a girl and gets caught up in the dark world in which she is involved in.

Ultimately Jean decides that helping the girl is more important than his freedom and he is doomed because of it. Unlike many of the American noirs, which this is a precursor to, the girl is not evil or crazy. She too is a victim of her milieu.

I thought that it was interesting that in both this movie and in Daybreak we have a young, innocent girl who is victimized by an older male “protector”.

Although the picture is dark and gloomy, the picture is ultimately positive as Jean dies a hero. Jean Gabin was really good in this.

Daybreak (1939)

Le jour se lève as it is known in France, was made in cinema’s great year, 1939. What I really love about this movie is that is so honest. From the beginning of the movie you know that Francois, played by Jean Gabin, is a doomed man and in Carne and Prevert’s hands he remains so right through the end. No Hollywood here.

The film begins with Francois killing Valentin. He then barricades himself in his room and reflectively waits for dawn when the police will break in and get him.

The film is then shown in a series of flashbacks as we find out how Francois got into the situation that he is in. I don’t think the movie does that great of job of establishing Valentin as an evil character. Perhaps, it is the way Carne and Prevert wanted it. Things aren’t always black and white. Sometimes good and evil get a little muddled.

If the story is only OK, the tone and look of the movie are great. This movie was included in Sight and Sounds 10 Greatest Movies List.

La bete humaine (1938)

  I really enjoyed “The Human Beast”. It had so many elements of film noir in it. When Simone Simon’e character Séverine told Jean Gabin’s character Jacques that she could never really love anyone because of the things that had happened to her in the past, I immediately thought of Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity. When she gives Jacques that look when he couldn’t kill her husband I knew he was a goner.

I thought the triangular storyline was great. Also the insights into Séverine’s past, which made her the way she was added some nice depth to the movie. And the trains… Jacques love affair with his train was almost as strong as his love for Séverine.

I thought the movie had a couple of flaws. The “madness disease” that Jacques inherited from his drinking ancestors really didn’t work. The movie was going along really well and didn’t need this justification for his actions. It would have been much better if he just knocked her off when he came to his senses on how he had been manipulated.

I haven’t read the book by Zola, on which the movie is based, but I am sure that the movie was trying to stay somewhat faithful to some of the story lines in the book, but that was one they could have done without.

Jean Jabin and Simon Simone were both terrific in this. In fact all the acting was great. I really think if the “madness” subplot had been left out this could have ranked with Renoir’s other great movie, The Rules of the Game.