At first blush I thought “what do these old guys ‘think’ they’re going to do with these young girls.” Silly me…it’s Jean Gabin. Max and the gangsters are middle~aged men. ) The thrust of the story is he’s pulled a job netting a couple of thousands in gold bullions but his friend and partner is kidnapped by a rival gang and Max must pay a ransom to get him back …those gold bullions. ( …And dashingly wears the hell out of double breasted suits. He walks confidently through the underworld. The other men look to him as their leader. He’s a take-charge-take-care-of-business kinda guy. The movie shows us Max’s life and how he walks through his world. You know he knows what to do…on a heist or in the bedroom. He’s a man a ruggedly beautiful and masculine man. He’s not handsome at all by Hollywood-standards. Nope, he’s not the pretty boy~type in the Delon / Jourdan mold. The head of the gang is MAX played by Jean Gabin. 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.She’s there for him before, during…and after 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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