Word: gabin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Stormy Waters (MGM International), a French-made film with English titles, stars Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan, two talented French players who have long since attracted the admiring attention of Hollywood. Completed in 1940 just before the fall of France, the negative of this picture was spirited away to Bordeaux and kept hidden during the occupation...
...story, based on Roger Vercel's Goncourt Prize novel, Remorques (published in the U.S. as Salvage-TIME, Jan. n, 1937), is lacking in what the U.S. trade likes to call "big story values." Nothing much happens. Tugboat Captain Gabin, married for ten years to a nice, affectionate little blonde, suddenly finds that he's mad about Mile. Morgan. Except for a few convincing details, that's practically the whole plot...
Amid all this bustle, it remained for a 23-year-old U.S. musicomedy to attract, fortnight ago, the season's glossiest first-night audience and its loudest cheers. Tout Paris-Marlene Dietrich, Mistinguett, Jean Gabin, Lucien Lelong, many another-swarmed to No, No, Nanette, stayed on for 18 curtain calls...
...Pepe" is less dressed up than "Algiers," just as "Forgotten Village" is less finicky than, say, "How Green Was My Valley." It is helped, too, by having a Jean Gabin kind of cast: "Pepe's" characters are not the technically standardized characters of the Hollywood cloth. It's a refreshing change, despite some fast French and a few sloppy English titles...
...scenes and by some unusually vivid uses of sound (coyotes, snores, a neighing horse) and camera (scrambled focus for excitement and intoxication) to startle and amuse. John Wayne manages, more toughly if less charmingly than Gary Cooper in his early days, to create a sort of Rocky Mountain Jean Gabin. Jean Arthur, who has the brunt of the comedy to handle, is one of the most attractive handlers in the business, but undermines some of her funniest work by a growing tendency to put the horseplay before the part...