![]() The wise-guy, almost vaudevillian tone of the book gives way in the film to a clipped melancholy, unblinking and loaded with gravity. ![]() ![]() Crowded with incident, casually violent, narrated with a sort of comic grandiosity, it works its effects entirely through the power of an unleashed dialect, and the effect is something like a Gallic marriage of Damon Runyon and Mickey Spillane.īecker keeps the novel’s milieu and a good number of its characters-and changes just about everything else. Told in the first person by the aging career criminal Max le Menteur (played in the film by Jean Gabin), Simonin’s novel is an exuberant exercise in argot for its own sake and even comes with a glossary to help the reader wade through its impasto of criminal discourse. In fact Becker, with the help of Simonin, pretty much threw the book out the window. Jacques Becker’s 1954 heist thriller Touchez pas au grisbi was the comeback he needed, and it propelled him into a successful second act, which lasted until his death in 1976.Albert Simonin’s novel Touchez pas au grisbi is said to have had a revolutionary impact on French crime writing, and Jacques Becker’s film version had a similarly transformative effect on French crime films, yet film and novel bear little resemblance to each other. Following a brief, less successful stint in Hollywood and a period of fighting with the Allies in North Africa during World War II, Gabin saw his film career slow down, and he appeared mostly in supporting roles for a while (including in Ophuls’s Le plaisir). ” Soon after Pépé, Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece Grand Illusion hit, and it was an even bigger smash, cementing Gabin’s superstar status in this and all of his most successful roles ( La bête humaine, Le jour se lève), Gabin played some form of working-class social outcast, and he always provided audiences with a strong point of identification. As Michael Atkinson has written for Criterion, “Without its iconic precedent, there would have been no Humphrey Bogart, no John Garfield, no Robert Mitchum, no Randolph Scott, no Jean-Paul Belmondo (or Breathless or Pierrot le fou), no Jean-Pierre Melville or Alain Delon, no Steve McQueen. His work with director Julien Duvivier would prove his most important: they collaborated on two successful films in the midthirties ( Maria Chapdelaine and La bandera), but it was their third, Pépé le moko, that, in creating the romantic criminal antihero archetype, shot Gabin into the stratosphere. This led to roles in silent films, but it was with the advent of sound that Gabin found his true calling-even if his quiet stoicism was what he would become best known for. He eventually followed in his family’s footsteps, though, appearing onstage at various Paris music halls and theaters, including the Moulin Rouge. Though his parents were cabaret performers, Gabin-born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in 1904-put off show business at first, working instead as a laborer for a construction company. With his penetrating gaze, quiet strength, and unshakeable everyman persona, Jean Gabin was the most popular French matinee idol of the prewar period, and remains one of the great icons of cinema.
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