Jean Gabin plays a working–class military hero known throughout Southern France as "lover boy" for his cavalier way with women. (The more literal translation of the title is something like "lover lips" or "lover puss.") When he meets his match in an elusive, wealthy Parisian (Mireille Balin), he sacrifices both title and job and embarks on a masochistic life of lying in wait for his obscure object of desire. In his brooding, closed–mouthed 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 Gabin and Balin, but a source of its power lies in the visuals with which Grémillon meticulously sets his scene; shooting on location in Paris and Orange, 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 Provence; a cinema–lobby mirror in which lovers are reunited; the importance of a lobster cooked to perfection-all provide a fittingly material setting for this love sacrificed to economics. (JB)