Word: gabin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best possible formula for quieting objections to his frankly polemic theme: natural childbirth. He creates a picture that is dramatically first-rate even without the birth scene, puts it together with a blend of personal compassion and cinematic skill. In the almost fable-simple tale, Old Pro Jean Gabin plays a weary, health-broken physician who moves to a tiny mountain village in the South of France to live out his years. With him he brings his conviction, gained from years of work in the slums of Paris, that much of the pain and fear of childbirth can be eliminated...
...makers of this movie are concerned, in a spirit not completely commercial, with authenticity. The whole picture-except perhaps for the Hollywood ending-carries a strong conviction to the moviegoer that what he is seeing is really happening; and the conviction is strongest when the camera is watching Jean Gabin, who is just right as un gros legume-a big vegetable...
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...