Restored Masterpieces of Jean Gabin

For those of us whose schoolboy French is not up to the sophisticated dialogue of the best French movies without subtitles, some of the new restorations are a godsend. Not only do they have sparkling Blu-ray images, but with the press of a button you can call up sous-titres Anglais; and very good titles they are too. The only problem is that what seem to be very fine discussions by eminent film scholars in the special features or “supplements” are not titled—which is very frustrating. Still we have the films, and it is clear from postings online that enthusiasts from all countries are keeping up the pressure for even more restorations and titling.

One treasure that I would have liked to include in my review (Quadrant, March 2016) of the Criterion Collection of Julien Duvivier’s films of the 1930s is the restoration of La Belle Équipe (1936) that was released in November 2016. The film is the holy grail of Duvivier studies. For years it was only available with the optimistic ending that was disavowed by both Duvivier and the screenwriter, Charles Spaak. Then after legal action by Duvivier’s descendants the film could not be shown at all, at least legally. I’m sure some collectors had prints or clandestine tapes. This new restoration, however, proudly announces it is Duvivier and Spaak’s original version. You can find the optimistic ending in the documentary in the “supplements” on the making of film—but without subtitles.

This comes close to rewriting film history. La Belle Équipe was shown for years with the upbeat conclusion, and this was the way it was experienced by its original audiences. Indeed there is reason to believe this was the ending audiences preferred. Both versions were shown to test audiences and they voted overwhelmingly for the optimistic resolution. Without any disrespect to Duvivier, Spaak and those who fought to restore the artists’ original intentions, viewers should be able to experience both the film as it was first shown, and now how its makers intended. You can extract the optimistic ending from the documentary in the supplements, but it is not quite the same as being able to view the movie with the upbeat conclusion. The ideal for this sort of thing was achieved by the DVD of the restoration of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, which had both the director’s conclusion and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s re-edit. This was also fair to Zanuck, who was anything but an insensitive hack.

Still, we now have a restored La Belle Équipe and it is worth the wait. The film was originally intended as an ironic comment on the beliefs in fraternal solidarity that came with the rise of the Popular Front and the installation of the government of Leon Blum in 1936 that promised so much before disintegrating in the chaos of the Third Republic. Duvivier appears to have been sceptical from the start yet drawn to the Popular Front ideals of solidarity and comradeship.

La Belle Équipe begins with five unemployed workers winning a hundred thousand francs in the national lottery. Led by Jean (played by Jean Gabin) they agree to pool the money to renovate a rundown chateau to create a riverside café—a guignette. According to a friend who viewed the film with me, the style of these early scenes was similar to French farce. For me the pace was certainly farcical. At least one couple was being hidden—from the police, not from an irate husband—but the action seemed closer to the American screwball comedies of the period: frantic movement, accelerated dialogue, the lot. Duvivier keeps his camera back as his characters hurtle up and down the stairs of his tenement set, play cards in candlelit rooms—the landlord turns off the power for his unemployed tenants in the evening—as they all affirm their boisterous camaraderie at the top of their voices.

The sequences where “the five” begin building the café have a pastoral quality with soft black-and-white photography, elegant travelling shots along the river bank, and quietly effective scenes as the friends walk through the countryside. It reminded me at times of Jean Renoir’s Partie de Compagne, made the same year; the half-finished masterpiece that evokes Renoir père’s paintings.

Soon shadows fall on the five’s camaraderie. One leaves because he is in love with his friend’s mistress, then the couple have to depart because of the man’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Most dramatic of all, Charlot, one of the leaders of the group, takes money from the reserve to appease his ex-wife Suzy who has heard about the lottery win. This turns into a dark triangle love story. Charlot, played sensitively by Charles Vanel, still loves his worthless wife, played in splendidly sluttish style by Viviane Romance. Jean gets some of the money back but also seduces her, or she seduces him; it’s left enjoyably ambiguous.

Duvivier manages these shifts in style and mood with great skill. A tour de force has Gabin as Jean sing “As we walk by the waterside” at the celebration of the completion of the building of the café. For a few moments it seems like a musical, with Raymond Aimos’s Tintin planting a flag on the roof—only to lose his footing and fall to his death. There follows a hauntingly beautiful mourning scene as Jean and Charlot keep vigil by their friend’s candlelit coffin.

Even given this, and the scenes where it is discovered that some of “The Five” have betrayed their ideals, the bitter despair of the crime passionel resolution does not work. For me it seems imposed on the material, while the gentler conclusion suggesting a partial victory is truer to what has gone before. In any case we have both endings and perhaps eventually we will have a DVD edition that makes them easier to access.

The new restoration I would have liked to compare La Belle Équipe with is a subtitled DVD of Duvivier’s legendary Voici les Temps d’Assassins (1956) that reportedly includes one of Gabin’s finest later performances. Apparently a good print exists, even a DVD, but not with English subtitles. However, a splendid restoration of a noir directed by Gilles Grangier and starring Gabin has just been released. It is Le Désordre et la Nuit (1958), now readily available with excellent subtitles from Amazon.fr. To the best of my memory the film has never been shown in Australia. For those of us who remember American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s the style Grangier adopts is familiar—high-contrast black-and-white photography, a jazz score and lots of long walks down rain-washed streets. Films that come to mind as possible influences are Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and possibly Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) with cinematography by James Wong Howe and Woody Bredell respectively. But Grangier’s exploitation of the style is much less self-conscious than in the earlier American masterpieces, and the writing and direction are much less melodramatic and stylised.

We are introduced to a group of sleazy characters in a cramped Parisian nightclub. The jazz is good but it is also a clip joint with overpriced drinks and call girls plying their trade. The owner is murdered and maverick Inspector Vallois (Jean Gabin) is asked to make a report. This is no repeat of Commissaire Maigret, the part Gabin had played for Jean Delannoy earlier that year. The inspector’s superiors are not really anxious for a solution until a wealthy industrialist with contacts in the government becomes involved. Indeed, just about everyone is compromised.

Vallois begins a May–December romance with Lucky (Nadja Tiller) a drug-addicted sometime “student” who hangs out at the club and picks up the wary detective. Flawed heroes are to be expected in film noir but the civilised French amorality is refreshing. Equally welcome is the absence of violence. The threat is always there, but there is only one brawl, observed with distaste by Vallois as he protects Lucky and takes a broken bottle away from a drunken partygoer. For the rest, the film is built around a series of two- and three-handed scenes between Vallois, Lucky and Therese, an enigmatic pharmacist played with icy restraint by Danielle Darrieux.

Gabin, always an unselfish performer and one of the best on-screen listeners in the business, makes this riveting cinema. So much so that Grangier is able to tell much of the story from Vallois’s perspective. The resolution is dramatically satisfying because it is completely in character and without the heavy-handed moralising that spoilt so many American noirs of the period.

Emphasised at the time was the splendid jazz score by Jean Yatove played on-screen by accomplished African-American performers, including the singer, dancer and jazz pianist Hazel Scott, a staunch civil rights activist who had left America after an uncompromising appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She has a nice scene with Gabin, who had suggested her to Grangier. Gabin had done much the same for Josephine Baker twenty-five years earlier and, like Baker, Scott proved to be brilliant.

Although mainly a studio film, Le Désordre et la Nuit evokes the world of 1950s Parisian jazz recreated in Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986). Tavernier is an admirer of the film and has been responsible for a revival of the work of Gilles Grangier. All of which leads us to hope that more of these masterpieces will be available avec sous-titres Anglais.

As this issue was going to press, news came from his family of the death of the renowned Australian journalist and historian Phillip Knightley. He was a loyal friend who provided much-needed support during my writing of Valiant for Truth: The Life of Chester Wilmot. The book is dedicated to him because as well as assisting me Phillip wrote The First Casualty, a ground-breaking history of war correspondents to which all of us who write about war reporting are indebted.

Famously, Phillip was the last journalist to interview the British traitor Kim Philby before his death. His reporting on the scandals at MI6 had a clarity and objectivity that was refreshingly free of the malice that disfigured much of the British writing on the so-called Cambridge spies. Indeed, in all his writing , “valiant for truth” applies as much to Phillip Knightley as it does to Chester Wilmot.