![]() 1938's Port of Shadows and 1939's Le Jour Se Lève are two of French cinema's most applauded classics after all. In the late 30s, this thespian found another master of cinema worth his talents in Marcel Carné. Still, we can offer some recommendations. We'd need the length of a book to do him justice. To write about all of Gabin's wonderful performances and even better films is an impossible task for this sort of write-up. It's a miracle of acting externalizing a character's internal struggle with as much potency as poetry. Playing against the luminous Simon Simone, Gabin breathes briny life into a man who wants to be gentle despite a marrow-deep predisposition towards violence. If you doubt that, take a look at his work in Renoir's 1938 proto-noir La Bête Humaine. However, he was always an actor before he was a celebrity and his performances never evidence the laziness of someone coasting by on charisma. Roguish and rugged, often brutish, emanating an air of authority whether he's a criminal or a policeman, handsome but not beautiful, Gabin had a consistent star persona. In the same year, he starred in Grand Illusion, giving an Oscar-worthy performance in a rebellious role that would further help typify the Jean Gabin-type. The Lower Depths marked his first work for Jean Renoir and it's one of Jean Gabin's greatest films, while 1937's Pepé Le Moko, directed by Duvivier, gave the actor his best characters until then and expanded his recognizability outside of France. That role proved to be Gabin's ticket to fame, and, in the following years, he'd appear in a series of other notable French classics. In 1934, Julien Duvivier directed the actor in Maria Chapdelaine, a prestigious literary adaptation featuring a rural romantic triangle. By the end of the 1920s, he had jumped from live performances to silent cinema, but it would be the advent of talkies that truly catapulted Gabin towards stardom. After a stint in the military, the aspiring actor continued to earn employment on stage, touring across South America and performing on the Moulin Rouge while imitating the stylings of Maurice Chevalier. He had humble beginnings as the laborer son of a café owner and a cabaret performer, starting his career in show business with a bit part in a Folies Bergères variety revue. ![]() Jean Gabin was a divinity of the Silver Screen, as magnetic as he was devastating…īefore his golden collaborations with Renoir, Jean Gabin, born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé, was already a star. Instead, our subject matter is one of French cinema's greatest stars, a brilliant actor that grew to be a cultural monument, the leading man of that historic '38 Best Picture nominee. As we all know, it'd take 81 years for one such picture to win Hollywood's most coveted trophy, but we're not here to talk about Parasite's glorious victory as tempting as that is. It became the first non-English language film to ever do so. Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, a French drama about class hierarchies and political strife in World War I, received a Best Picture nomination. The 11th Academy Awards marked an important first in Oscar history.
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