'Jean Gabin' by Joseph Hariss
Actor Jean Gabin appeared in nearly 100 films in a career that stretched from 1930 through his death in 1976. He is recognized internationally by film buffs for his role in Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937), but in France, he became an institution, a kind of Gallic Gary Cooper with a face ready for carving onto stone monuments. He is the subject of a new biography, Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France.
Biographer Joseph Harriss is an American in Paris, educated at the French Institute of Political Studies and formerly of Time magazine’s Paris bureau. When he writes that Gabin’s movies are regulars on late night television in his adopted homeland, and that Gabin is the subject of many French documentaries, we have no reason to doubt his word. Harriss repeatedly reiterates his book’s subtitle, The Actor Who Was France, yet there is a wistful note in his symphony of praise, a recognition that the France Gabin embodied might today be a memory, a ghost.
Gabin’s grandfather was a working man from a small village drawn to Paris for jobs. He inherited that man of the people, that earthy proletarianism, along with his father’s chutzpah for departing that dead end for life as a café singer. Gabin followed his father into the music halls before breaking into film. His screen roles ranged from downtrodden drifters with tragic destinies to gangland bosses, from grease-covered locomotive engineers to homburg-wearing capitalists. In youth he often played criminals and in old age, world-weary detectives. During World War II, he left his temporary exile in Hollywood to fight with the Free French.
As an almost totemic representative of his nation’s movie industry, he became a particular target of abuse from the new wave filmmakers who emerged in the ‘60s. “Though he never said so publicly, Gabin was hurt by their contempt … by the feeling that they had sidelined him as irrelevant to modern cinema,” Harriss writes. Truffaut and company changed the direction of film while Gabin embodied a chapter of film history. From the perspective of the present century, we can admire both sides.
Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France is published by University Press of Kentucky.
