Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France

Journalist Harriss (The Tallest Tower) delivers a competent introduction to French actor Jean Gabin (1904–1976). Harriss begins with the actor’s birth to two moderately successful singers. As a teenager, Gabin used his father’s connections to land spots performing onstage at the Folies Bergère music hall in Paris, where he achieved regard as a singer and comedian, launching him into the film world in the 1930s. His popularity peaked, Harriss contends, with such movies as Pépé le Moko, La Grande Illusion, and La Bête Humaine, which established Gabin as the face of réalisme poétique, a stylized genre that served as a forerunner to film noir. During WWII, he refused to act in films made in collaboration with the Vichy government, so he left for America. There, Gabin had little success in English-language movies, in which “he always sounded stilted and felt uncomfortable.” Harriss chronicles Gabin’s return to France and his fitful attempts to restart his career after the war, finally finding his footing after developing a “new middle-aged persona” and completing an additional 48 films before dying in 1976. Harriss’s approach is workmanlike, relaying the beats of Gabin’s life effectively if somewhat perfunctorily. This solid if unexciting account of the actor’s life will appeal to devotees of French cinema. (Jan.)