Word: gabin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Four Bags Full (Franco London; Trans-Lux) of black-market pork are lugged across Nazi-held Paris by Jean Gabin and Comedian Bourvil in this delightful shaggy-dog story. That the French can now joke about the German occupation is not surprising. But the movie, winner of France's "best film" Victoire, explodes with humor, testifying that its makers never stopped laughing up their sleeves when they dared not guffaw outright...
Bourvil, an unbacked Paris hackie, supports himself by odd jobs, including meat-running. A stupid and unimaginative fellow, he enlists the help of Gabin in transporting a freshly slaughtered pig through an obstacle course lined with gendarmes, prostitutes, Nazi soldiers, informers and other keen-nosed dogs. Only the Gallic touch could make such a dangerous journey seem so funny and so sad at the same time. The mishaps that befall the pair have a wonderfully impromptu quality, as if Director Claude Autant-Lara, occasionally glancing at the story (by Marcel Ayme) from which the movie is loosely taken, made...
Beneath all the froth is a superb, incisive character study of the two men. Bourvil's slow mind can concentrate only on moving the meat. But to Gabin, a famous artist mistaken by his dull-witted companion for a house painter, the meat is an abstraction, a philosophical means of testing the cowardice of his countrymen and the wits of his enemies. After slipping their burden past one more peril, Gabin roars with immense self-appreciation: "This pig's making a genius out of me!" He unsuccessfully tries to persuade Bourvil to hijack their load...
...beginning of The Lower Depths states that before the film was made, Maxim Gorki approved approved the adaptation. Unfortunately for Gorki he praiseworthy aspects of the picture are not 3 result of his lines, but of Jean Renoir's direction and the acting of Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin...
Jouvet as the ruined Baron and Gabin as Pepel, the reformed their, give the only non-stereotyped portrayals, although Vladimir Sokoloff makes the landlord a suitably despicable individual...