Jointly from France and Italy, a key work of postwar European psychology, René Clément’s Au-delà des grilles (literally, Beyond the Gates), in Italy known as Le mura di Malapaga, beautifully fleshes out a highly melodramatic scheme of past, present and future in order to portray, combinately, European trauma and uncertainty. It won the Oscar as […]
Tag Archives: Jean Gabin
Julien and Clémence Bouin live at the end of what had once been a pretty street in Courbevoie, a Paris suburb. The retired couple, a former typesetter and an acrobat, hardly speak to each other, eat separate meals, sleep in separate beds; Clémence wonders whether it is her pronounced limp, the result of a circus […]
Jean Gabin (best actor, Venice) is superb as Max, an aging gangster in the Montmartre district of Paris, who has convinced himself, at least, that he wishes to retire, in Jacques Becker’s razor-sharp, electrifying, ultimately wistful film noir of gangland warfare, Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!). Gabin’s final touch of secret gaiety […]
Although it isn’t great like Aleksandr Sokurov’s film drawn from Dostoievski’s novel Crime and Punishment, Whispering Pages (1993), or even as dramatically striking as Pierre Chenal’s stripped-down 1935 Crime et châtiment, Georges Lampin’s modern update/Frenchification doesn’t deserve the oblivion into which it has mostly passed. For some of us, after all, it is the film […]
If nothing else, scenarist Jacques Prévert and filmmaker Marcel Carné’s Quai des brûmes is momentous for launching two great movements in cinema: in France, poetic realism; in the U.S., film noir, which John Huston three years later invented by hardboiling poetic realism for The Maltese Falcon. Moreover, Carné’s film gets better with each fresh viewing. […]
Dennis Grunes 