A major discovery of this French series has been Jean Grémillon--one of France's best kept secrets, whose films are only now beginning to be recognized internationally as some of the best made in the Thirties and Forties. With expertise as both a musician and a documentarty filmmaker, Grémillon created some remarkable fiction films. He has commented “Realism is the discovery of what the human eye cannot perceive directly, establishing harmonies, unknown relationships between objects and beings.... (The cinema's) function and even its responsibility is to take stock of our times...(and not to) turn back the hourglass in order to give the illusion that the times themselves have also been turned back....” --quoted in Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”

Gueule d'Amour
Jean Gabin plays a working class military hero known throughout Southern France as “lover boy” for his cavalier way with women. (“Gueule d'Amour” is translated here as “lover boy,” although the literal translation - something like “lover lips” or “lover puss” - presents a coarser and more interesting attitude toward the character.) When he meets his match in an elusive, wealthy Parisian, he sacrifices both title and job and embarks on a masochistic life of lying in wait for his obscure object. In his brooding, closed mouth intensity, he is the essential romantic hero; in his longing and his patience he will not bend...before he breaks.
Gueule d'Amour is driven by the electricity between Jean Gabin and Mireille Balin, but a source of its power lies in the visuals with which Grémillon meticulously sets his scene; out of inanimate objects he creates a France alive with personality. The glasses arrayed on top of a bar, and the secret door underneath it; the rooftops of Southern France; a cinema-lobby mirror in which lovers are reunited; the art nouveau entrance to the Metro, or the underside of a cafe awning; the importance of a lobster cooked to perfection...all provide a fittingly material setting for this love sacrificed to economics. (JB)