The camera loved Jean Gabin. Lit just so, his eyes suggested much but told little about an interior world. In this way he was a natural icon of the poetic realism movement of the 1930s (writer Jacques Prévert, directors Marcel Carné and Julian Duvivier), whose heroes were doomed by environment, destroyed by love. But there were many facets to Jean Gabin, not all of them fated to tragedy. Renoir tapped Gabin's unassuming common man in the salt–of–the–earth soldier of Grand Illusion. French audiences found a working–class hero in Gabin-not Everyman but essence, a proletarian nobility.
Gabin (1904–1976) was the son of a music hall performer and in fact started out in the family trade; that relaxed song–and–dance man shines through in his more charming characters. During the Occupation, Gabin was the man who accompanied Marlene Dietrich to Hollywood, returning with the Free French forces. Postwar, his hangdog hero out of favor, he evolved into a kind of éminence grise (...or grisbi). His golden period is bracketed by two memorable jewel thieves-Duvivier's Pépé le Moko in 1937, and the aging gentleman gangster in Jacques Becker's 1954 Touchez pas au grisbi (which we look forward to in re-release next year). In the intervening years he was hard at work as a thief of hearts.
-Judy Bloch
