Jean Gabin was the most popular actor in France during the 1930s. His appeal lay in his ability to portray characters that resonated with the public during the politically volatile years of the Great Depression. France flirted with Communism and Socialism during these years and Gabin, whose violent, sexual charisma was more than Hollywood could put on the screen, specialized in the working class hero or anti-hero. He played murderers and thieves, sailors and train drivers; strong, silent, highly controlled types who were usually driven to fits of murderous rage, which almost always lead to his death. These scenes of uncontrollable fury were a must in a Gabin film and the actor wisely inserted a clause in his contracts that each picture contain at least one scene of this type. He knew what his public wanted and expected.

Gabin was born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé on May 17, 1904, in Paris, the youngest of seven children in a show-biz family, as both of his parents, Ferdinand Moncorgé and Hélène Petit, were cabaret performers. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the village of Mériel, which now has a museum in his honor. Andre Brunelin later said, "Mériel was for him what Whitechapel was for Chaplin. It was the first source of his creative inspiration." From the window of his bedroom he could see the trains coming and going from the station and he was fascinated by them. His grandfather had been a train mechanic and engineer and he explained how they ran. Gabin then wanted to become a train engineer but the closest he got was playing one in La Bête Humaine (1938). As a young man, Gabin worked blue-collar jobs before getting a small part in a Folies Bergères show in 1922. The following year, he appeared in the operetta Bouffes Parisiens. Like Maurice Chevalier before him, he was not above romancing his way up the ladder to sing with the show's star, in this case, the famed singer Mistinguett, who was 30 years his senior. Gabin later said, "I understood immediately that to get success I had to make for the front door, not for the back one. And the front door was the door of Mistinguett's dressing room".

Gabin's career was temporarily derailed when he had to participate in mandatory military service and when that was over, went back into show business and changed his name to Jean Gabin. He continued to sing in music halls, imitating Chevalier and touring South America before returning to France and the famed Moulin Rouge. His popularity increased, as did the quality of his stage roles and in 1928, he appeared in his first silent film. In 1930, the Pathé Frères company hired him for his first sound role in Chacun sa Chance (1930). Between 1930 and 1934, he played mostly supporting parts in more than a dozen films before the role that first got him serious attention, the fur-trapper in Maria Chapdelaine (1934), directed by Julien Duvivier. He then went into Zouzou (1934) opposite Josephine Baker, the African-American singer/dancer who was a huge star in Europe. The war film La Bandera (1935), also directed by Duvivier, made him a star; a year later he starred in Les bas-fonds, an adaptation of The Lower Depths (1936), directed by Jean Renoir.

1937 was Gabin's year. Pépé le Moko (1937) was an international smash hit and was remade the following year with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr in Hollywood as Algiers (1938). Boyer would later complain that the director would run each scene of Pépé le Moko for the cast and insist that Boyer imitate Gabin. In 1937, Gabin also starred in Jean Renoir's greatest film Grande Illusion, an anti-war drama set during WWI which was made during a time when another world war was becoming inevitable. As a result, it was not an easy movie to get financed. Renoir needed Gabin's help to make the film, "We peddled Grand Illusion in every office of Paris - American companies, French companies, Italian companies - and nobody wanted it. It lasted two years, and Jean Gabin was with me. 'I want to play the part.' And they said, well, a picture with Gabin is very good but we don't want this story. Finally, I found a man who was not in the movies. He was a gambler and had won a large amount of money at the stock exchange. And he said, 'Well, I don't know what to do with the money. You want to make a picture. Here is the money." La Grande Illusion was an international hit and offers began to pour in from Hollywood, but Gabin refused them. Three years later, he said yes.

Gabin would make two more films with Renoir, an adaptation of Emile Zola's La Bête Humaine and, finally, in 1954 French Cancan. When the war broke out in September 1939, Gabin remained in France until it fell to the invading German forces in 1940. Like his friend Renoir, he escaped to the United States and went to Hollywood. And, like Renoir, Gabin knew that if he stayed in France, he would be forced to make films under the Nazis. Instead, he went to Twentieth Century-Fox. His first American film was Moontide (1942), opposite Ida Lupino, which co-starred Thomas Mitchell and Claude Rains, in which he played a longshoreman prone to alcoholic blackouts who rescues a suicidal girl. His second - and last - American film was for Universal; a propaganda drama called Strange Confession (1944), directed by Duvivier. Neither were hits.

Physically, Jean Gabin resembled Spencer Tracy, but he had a sexual appeal that Tracy never had. He was part Gable, part Bogart, and completely himself. But like Gerard Depardieu forty years later, Gabin in French was a star. Gabin in English wasn't. Perhaps it was because the image of the Frenchman engrained in the American psyche was that of Charles Boyer and Jean-Pierre Aumont; a sophisticated European lover. Gabin wasn't sophisticated; he was earthy. Gabin himself explained it by saying that like some French wines, he did not travel well.

During this time in the United States, Gabin met actress Marlene Dietrich in New York, who helped him get settled and testified on his behalf to the FBI that Gabin was not pro-Vichy and should not be deemed an enemy alien. They began an affair that lasted several years. When he demanded that Dietrich be cast opposite him in a film at RKO, the studio refused. Gabin then ruined his American career by returning to France and enlisting in the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. Not only did he feel it was his duty to fight for his country, he did not want to return to France having sat out the war in luxury in Hollywood while his countrymen suffered. Gabin fought in North Africa and ended up earning the Médaille militaire and a Croix de guerre.

The Dietrich-Gabin affair was passionate and, at times, violent. Gabin's jealous nature would get the better of him and he would hit Dietrich, who was unfaithful. Despite this, she was obsessively in love with him. When Gabin joined the Free French, Dietrich joined the USO and met up with Gabin all over Europe, once running dramatically after him and shouting his name while he was riding in a tank. He was mortified when the procession was halted and he had to kiss her in front of everyone. After the war, the two co-starred in The Room Upstairs (1946), which did not do well at the box office and did nothing for their relationship. In the end, Gabin wanted children, which Dietrich could not produce, and she was still married to her husband, although the two had been separated for years. She had also been having an affair with General James Gavin, leading to Gavin's wife filing for divorce. Although Dietrich considered Jean Gabin her greatest love, she would not give up her career or move to France permanently and Gabin ended the affair, telling her he never wanted to see her again. A few years later, Dietrich moved nearby, and would sit in a cafe near his home, watching Gabin and his new wife come and go. In 1963, when Robert Kennedy asked her to name the most attractive man she had ever known, Marlene Dietrich said, "Jean Gabin."

Post-war Jean Gabin did not have the same appeal for audiences as in his early days. Like many of his contemporaries, his image belonged to another time and another world, and younger stars were taking his place. He had aged and put on several pounds and could no longer play the angry young man of the 1930s. Gabin was now in his 40s and his volatile personality got him fired several times from films. By 1947, he was appearing on the stage again, which proved to be unsuccessful. René Clément cast him in the lead role in his film Au-Delà Des Grilles (aka The Walls of Malapaga, 1949) with Isa Miranda, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, but ironically was not popular in France. Gabin's film career was in decline. It didn't help that he won the 1953 "Lemon Award" from the French press for being the most uncooperative French star.

In 1954, Gabin's career finally turned around with Jacques Becker's crime drama Touchez pas au grisbi (aka Don't Touch the Loot), co-starring Jeanne Moreau and Lino Ventura. It was the hit he needed, both domestically and internationally and for the next twenty years, he would make over 50 films, usually playing authority figures, and men who have truly lived, almost as if his characters from the 1930s films had aged and were now older, wiser, and acting as advisor to the younger generation. He became a French institution, co-starring with the biggest up-and-coming stars like Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot.

Jean Gabin worked steadily until his death of a heart attack, caused by complications from leukemia, at the American Hospital in Paris on November 11, 1976.

* Films in Bold will Air on TCM in August

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Gourbin, Bernard, L'espirt des années 60
The Internet Movie Database
Lanzoni, Rene Fournier French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present
Le Bail, Patrice and Le Bail, Bruno Les forteresse des illusions: Petite anthologie du cinéma français
Monush, Barry ScreenWorld Presents: The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Actors Vol. 1, From the Silent Era to 1965 http://www.musee-gabin.com
Renoir, Jean and Cardullo, Bert Jean Renoir: Interviews
Riva, J. David and Stern, Guy A Woman at War: Marlene Dietrich Remembered
Spoto, Donald Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich
Thomson, David The New Biographical Dictionary of Film