by The relations between Jean Gabin and the director Claude-Autant Lara were tense on the set of “La Traversée de Paris”. As this actor's initiative on the set tells. The director will give him the currency of his play later ..
“”This is a period that interests me enormously because … I have known the time of the occupation which is the time of all the courage and all the cowardice. This is a very important period because of this. ” It was the reflection of Claude-Autant Lara, who was one of the great French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1960s, in an interview with the Cahiers de la Cinémathèque, in 1978.
If his work is uneven and has an inevitable part of waste, we owe him some masterpieces, of which his film which remains the best known: the crossing of Paris, released in 1956.
Adapted from the work of Marcel Aymé, the crossing of Paris by Claude Autant-Lara (which will sign another film on the same theme with the unjustly overlooked the potatoes in 1969) draws up a harsh French portrait ready to do anything to find something to survive, while others are enriched at the price of gold the black market on the black market. We will know them later under the pejorative name of Bof, acronym for “cheese egg butter”, because this was the most requested.
This extraordinary film, cruel radiography of a France which survives under the occupation, is brought to arm by an anthology duo, Bourvil and Jean Gabin, to which we will gladly add, although to a lesser extent, the (ultimately short) performance of Louis de Funès, who then had been vegetable for a good time in quantity of negligible films without really unraveling, when he had just exceeded 40 years.
“Stay behind, that I don't see you!”
Unlike Funès, Jean Gabin never worked with Bourvil. The agreement between the two is however to be fine. According to André Brunelin, Gabin biographer, “The actor was fascinated by the way Bourvil had to approach certain scenes: a little like some Japanese actors, he” heated “before by doing certain physical and respiratory exercises that brought him to a kind of trance”.*(1)
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The relationship between Gabin and as much Lara is much more tense … the actor does not support “The irascible character, and especially the mania of as many-lara” tells Brunelin. “He was indeed used to standing at the foot of the camera just in front of the actor playing his scene and mumble, at the same time as him, the dialogue, while mimicking at the same time his expressions. It was an attitude that irritated John at the highest point. So much that one day, Jean arrives on the set with a screen, saying to as much-lara:” stay behind, that I do not see you! “
“On this, a gabin is particularly odious”
The filmmaker will “take revenge” of this vexation of the years later, in 1973, by dropping these unwelcome comments concerning Gabin …
“Gabin, he is an average actor, at the bottom. He never moves. You have to dress up to measure, otherwise … it's not an actor, it's a personality, and it's something else […] And then, Gabin, he defends his business too much, he wants it to last the business; Hence his mediocre films; He does not need directors, he needs servants, who abound in the sense of continuity at all costs of his little personal fricot. I was not from the directors' breed it needed. I was too “dangerous” for him, morally.
It could in the long run, do him wrong: he cautiously dropped me […] A large star actor has, in the current capitalist structure, his interests to be spared. He wants it to last, as long as possible … the film? Yes, that interests him- but what interests him more is him in the film. On this, a gabin is particularly odious “.
*(1) All quotes are extracted from the quarterly mook Schnock n ° 49 devoted to Bourvil.
