Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France (Web Exclusive)
by Joseph Harriss. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. 289 pp., illus. Hardcover: $34.95, Paperback: $24.95.

Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Jean Gabin was “The actor who was France”—twice. 

The first time Gabin “was France” was during a charged period in French social and political life leading up to and into the Second World War. Gabin (né Moncorgé), a wannabe farmer or locomotive engineer who reluctantly followed his father into the Parisian music halls, found himself by dint of hard work, canny choices, and historical serendipity, the most successful and highest paid French actor of the time.

It must be said that, on paper, the man France elevated as its “authentic” spirit in the 1930s played an unprepossessing body of marginal figures—burglars, killers, gangsters, deserters, suicides, rapists, and tramps. This is hardly the stuff of rousing nation- or identity-building, but that is the point. Gabin’s rise as a star paralleled the collapse of France and the Third Republic. Demographically decimated and economically paralyzed by the Great War—the setting of Gabin’s best-known film internationally, La grande illusion (1937)—France was in severe crisis. Governments right and left collapsed every few months, unable to deal with recession, mass unemployment, and Hitler’s aggressive territorial ambitions across the border. A sense of collective fatalism and self-pity obtained.

This was the atmosphere in which Poetic Realism emerged, a genre that fused literary naturalism, French Impressionist painting and film, German Expressionism, and popular café-concert sentimentality. Its central scenario—the ordinary guy in a cramped environment faced with circumstances he can’t control, menaced by untrustworthy father figures and femmes fatales—would underwrite American film noir, arguably the most influential genre in cinema history. When a Gabin character of this period was cornered, it was France that audiences saw on the verge of collapse. This metonymic transfer saw several of the films banned before and during the Occupation as either insulting France or being directly responsible for its ruin, rather than simply diagnosing an existing malaise.  

Poetic Realism is an unusual genre in that it depended almost entirely on one person—Gabin, who featured in most of its classics, including La Bandera (1935), La belle équipe (1936), and Pépé le Moko (1937) for Julien Duvivier; Les bas-fonds (1936), La grand illusion, and La bête humaine (1938) for Jean Renoir; Le quai des brumes (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939) for Marcel Carné; and Remorques (1941) and Lumière d’été (1943) for Jean Grémillon. Not only did his star power make the films financially viable, and his charisma bring mass audiences to stories with such bleak subject matter, but he was also responsible for choosing key creative collaborators and reworking scripts and dialogue to fit with his public persona as an authentic, argot-spouting, Parisian prole. It is this Gabin that is still best remembered outside France—the films were shown early in the United States, and shaped American cinephiles’ ideas of what French, European, or “world” cinema meant. Besides a handful of works by beloved auteurs Renoir and Jacques Becker, Gabin’s postwar work has never established a similar place in the canon.

Joseph Harriss says that Gabin showed the French “what it meant to be French.” What—and who—exactly do we mean here by the French? Harriss’s biography was first published in 2018. Of course, a lot has happened between 2018 and 2023—not least the #MeToo movement and the worldwide protests against the murder of black American George Floyd by white policemen in 2020. The book’s neglect of feminist or postcolonial perspectives would have been glaring in 2018 but seems culpable today. Harriss gives plenty of space to Gabin’s relationship with some of the world’s most desired actresses, in particular Michèle Morgan (with whom he formed an iconic “ideal couple” in Le quai des brumes), and Marlene Dietrich. “Relationship” is too collaborative a term—Gabin would pester the young actress he set his sights on (teenage Morgan was sixteen years his junior), engage his dresser as pimp to procure an encounter, and pester her with flowers and requests until she submitted. The forty-something Dietrich was, in public at least, able to take care of herself but Harriss repeats her daughter’s revelations that the violently jealous Gabin would beat Dietrich in response to her sexual freedom.  

At no point do such “facts” encourage Harriss to interrogate the masculinity presented in Gabin’s work and that was central to his Every(French)man persona. Or how that masculinity was rooted in misogyny—several Gabin films feature protracted, even gleeful scenes of Gabin blaming, humiliating or killing women. Is it going too far to suggest that these scenarios in prewar Gabin films pre-empt the popular épuration sauvage that took place after the Liberation of France—the public humiliation, head-shaving, and sexual and physical assault inflicted on women who were alleged to have slept or otherwise collaborated with the Germans? Perhaps—Gabin himself was disgusted at reports of such reprisals. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that arguably the most vicious single reprisal of the Liberation period was enacted on Mireille Balin, who was caught with her Wehrmacht lover, beaten, and raped by the Resistance, and imprisoned, before ending her life destitute. Balin had found fame playing the femme fatale who destroys the Gabin character in Pépé le Moko and Gueule d’amour (1937). 

Further, the misogyny of Gabin’s films colors the ideological ramifications of Harriss’s prose. Where Gabin is always presented as a straight-talking, no-nonsense, regular guy, the women in his life are consistently derogated. His mother’s distance and brutality leave him emotionally insecure all his life. His second wife Doriane was “[e]xtremely possessive” and “vindictive.” For whatever reason, the amazing Dietrich is subject to the most sustained sneering. This is how she is introduced: “Depending on your point of view, Marlene Dietrich could be seen variously as the Blonde Goddess of erotic fantasy, the Chaucerian Wife of Bath, or the biblical Whore of Babylon, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication.” She is repeatedly described as a liar, manipulative, “amoral” and “promiscuous.”

So, the “France” that Gabin embodied was a male France. For all his early reputation as an erotic figure, it is remarkable how many of his defining films, from La belle équipe to Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) center on intense male friendships. But if Gabin’s France was a male France, that male was very much a white male. Gabin’s breakthrough film—the one that made him more than a mere actor and set him on “proletarian folk hero” status—was not a Poetic Realist narrative of a man haunted and hunted. It was La bandera, a Foreign Legion melodrama set in one of France’s North African colonies. In fact, this film reverses the usual narrative trajectory of the later Poetic Realist works. Whereas in films like Le jour se lève, the Gabin character is rooted in an apparently stable community, but forced by circumstance into solipsism and criminality, in La bandera, he begins as a lone criminal who finds refuge, purpose, camaraderie, and ultimately redemption killing black people for the French Empire. La Bandera was shot in Spanish-held Morocco with the cooperation of future Fascist Leader Francisco Franco (to whom it was originally dedicated), as he plotted his coup against the democratically elected left-wing government in Spain.

History shows that when an imagined community is threatened, it is liable to turn on those even lower down the social pecking order. This might explain if not justify the racism, antisemitism, and “Other”-ing in 1930s films such as La bandera, Pépé le Moko, La grande illusion, and Le quai de brumes. But what about the films of the 1950s and 1960s, when most French people experienced a significant rise in living standards? Where Gabin’s move from struggling prole or criminal in the 1930s to patriarch/judge/medic/police inspector/president represented a sociological fact (even Gabin’s gangsters in this period are socially respectable corporate supremos, rather than wild cards like Pépé)? How then explain the racism that often drives these massively popular films, where the villain is more likely than not to be an immigrant from France’s North African colonies? Harris may not be the best moral guide to this subject, when he writes about “the chaotic, uncontrolled immigration from former colonies that diluted the country’s identity and created national self-doubt about what it meant to be French.” 

Harriss’s account of Gabin’s war and immediate postwar years is the most valuable part of the book. It is the one period during his long and illustrious career when Gabin was not in control. He was not, obviously, in control when the Nazis goosestepped into his beloved Paris, and, among other things, put an end to his burgeoning domestic film superstardom. There is something almost comic about the description of Gabin’s flight south with thousands of panicking Parisians, bickering with Doriane, and eventually abandoning her with the Buick stuffed with gold bars, as he continued his way on foot. He waited on the Riviera for passage to America via Lisbon—gambling and waterskiing while Europe burned, as begrudgers had it. The puppet Vichy government attempted to recruit Gabin for propaganda work, and it was only by deferring these offers, rather than rejecting them outright, that he finally secured passage (Gabin had made four films in Nazi Germany before the war and was in Berlin during Kristallnacht).

This dithering had serious consequences in the United States where he was suspected of being a collabo by the extant French film community in exile, and by the FBI, who placed him under surveillance during his relationship with Dietrich, herself suspected of being a fifth columnist. Hollywood, meanwhile, made a cack-handed attempt to turn the sui generis Gabin into a “Great French Lover” along the lines of Maurice Chevalier, whose famous lover Mistinguette helped Gabin to music hall fame in the late 1920s, and Gabin’s nemesis, Charles Boyer. A series of wrongheaded publicity drives, a failure to bed Ginger Rogers, the torrid affair with Dietrich, and an interesting but commercially unsuccessful attempt with Moontide (1942) to translate the Poetic Realist idiom to Hollywood, only exacerbated the frankly xenophobic Gabin’s sense of alienation and desire to join the fight in Europe. Of course, when the Free French high command heard of this, they were eager to co-opt him for propaganda, but Gabin held out, and went on to serve twenty-seven unglamorous months with the Free French army as an instructor and tank commander in North Africa, France, and Germany. He was awarded the Médaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre and given a full military funeral in 1976.

Gabin’s contemporary and subsequent reticence about his war work, which was equalled by few if any of his filmmaking compatriots, together with the snide perception that Gabin had jumped ship at France’s hour of need, meant that his career stalled after the war in a series of sometimes critically acclaimed but commercially underwhelming ventures. It was not until the massive success of Touchez pas au Grisbi in 1954, fifteen years after his last hit, that Gabin returned to mass esteem. He wasn’t even director Becker’s first choice in the unforgettable role of Max le Menteur, a figure whose mesmerising patriarchal authority served as blueprint for Gabin’s postwar persona. Gabin would soon become the Actor who was France a second time.

There is much in this section (chapters 11–18) that will be unfamiliar to even the seasoned French cinephile, and so probably justifies the book. But it must be admitted that, overall, the biography is pretty flimsy stuff to appear under a scholarly imprint—twice (McFarland & Company in 2018, University Press of Kentucky in 2023). Harriss is not a film critic or historian, and it shows. The sole evidence of primary archival research is a visit to the Musée Gabin, which is essentially a repository of memorabilia rather than enlightening historical material. Instead, Harriss relies unquestioningly on interviews Gabin gave toward the end of his life for a biography, unreliable celebrity memoirs, program notes, and hearsay. His lack of film expertise means that he repeats the received opinion of the late 1940s—whereby Carné and Duvivier are superior to Renoir and Grémillon. This is a position that few would endorse today, but that wouldn’t matter if Harriss genuinely held it, but instead of close analysis of key films we get a deadening catalogue of plot synopses. Take away the extensive padding —a former Paris correspondent for Time magazine, Harriss has written a cultural history of the Eiffel Tower and the Belle Époque, and lards Jean Gabin with extensive regurgitation of this marginally relevant earlier research—and you’re left with a glorified Wikipedia article. One that is shaky with facts; packed with quotes from books quoted in other books, rather than the books themselves; and spoiled by the author’s dislike of leftist politics, the Nouvelle Vague, and the French in general. One that comes no nearer to the source of big-nosed, thin-lipped, surly Jean Gabin’s popular appeal or mythic resonance. Social context is an inadequate framework for something based on prosaic but ineffable components like eyes, a smile, vocal delivery, or a way of walking. To even begin to approach the complexities of Gabin’s stardom would require the cinephile knowledge, historian’s scrupulousness and critical independence of a Joseph McBride or Scott Eyman. Gabin still awaits such a biographer.

Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3