The Irishman, Jean Gabin and Céline

In discussing the making of his elegiac masterpiece The Irishman, Martin Scorsese tells Spike Lee of the films he screened for Robert De Niro to prepare the actor for his role of Frank Sheehan, the eponymous mob hitman.

The films Scorsese mentions are French crime and gangster films of the 1950s and 1960s and are Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos and Le deuxième souffle (both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo); Jules Dassin’s Riffifi (starring Jean Savais); and Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi.

Regarding Touchez pas au grisbi, Scorsese says: 

‘I showed a film called Touchez pas au grisbi, which means “Don’t touch the loot”, which is a very famous early ’50s French gangster film with Jean Gabin. When I was shooting [Robert De Niro] in Casino I felt he was taking on the stature of a late-to-middle-age Gabin. He had a lot of power to him but he had a serenity to him too and a coolness. Bob I felt was getting that way in Casino. Grisbi has a similar [theme] in the sense that they are older gangsters in Paris and they are getting involved in stuff they don’t want to get involved with. It’s really the tone, but I like the Gabin feeling of his deportment, how he presented himself.’

This comparison between Gabin and De Niro is a wonderful insight from Scorsese that changes the way we look at Frank Sheehan and De Niro’s depiction of him. 

Gabin is, of course, the greatest actor of French cinema. His reputation was established in films of the 1930s poetic realism movement – Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths (based on the Maxim Gorky play); La Grande Illusion; and La Bete Humaine; Julien Duvivier’s Pépe le Moko; and Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Léve – before the Nazi occupation of France forced him into Hollywood exile.

Gabin made two films in Hollywood.

In Moontide (1942), he plays Bobo, a dock worker prone to drunken violence who wanders the seedy ports of California taking employment when and where he can. One night, he saves a woman (Ida Lupino) from drowning herself. At first, he is non-plussed by his heroism, but then falls in love with the would-be suicide. Bobo begins to doubt his aimless drifting and contemplates the virtues of a domestic life. Will Bobo’s buddy, who has shared his gypsy life and taken advantage of Bobo’s self-loathing and belief that he needs a buffer to prevent his brutal temper from getting him into trouble, allow Bobo to escape his influence and make a better life for himself?

Moontide bridges French poetic realism with American film noir, though this is not a drama of the city but of the sea, set amid the shacks, barges and dives of San Pablo bay. But the film is a failure. It lacks tension, is grim to the point of depressing – more grim noir than film noir – and suffers from some incredulous plotting. It would have been interesting to see what Fritz Lang – who left the film early on because of a conflict with Gabin over the Frenchman’s affair with Marlene Dietrich, who Lang was also involved with – would have done with the material.

Gabin’s second Hollywood film, The Imposter (1944), is more successful. Directed by fellow-exile Julien Duvivier, Gabin gives an intense and restrained performance as a convicted murderer (Clement) about to be guillotined for his crime. A priest accompanies Clement to his execution imploring the sneering prisoner to accept God and open the way for his salvation only for bombs to fall from the sky like thunderbolts from Zeus as the Nazis invade France. The bombs destroy the prison, massacre the executioners and God’s apologist and the criminal escapes.

A liberated Clement stumbles across a ragtag of French soldiers retreating south from the invading German army. The truck they are travelling in is strafed by German planes. Again, Clement is unscathed by the attack and takes the opportunity to rob one of the killed soldiers of his uniform and identity papers. As Lt Maurice LaFarge, Clement is able to escape France and find obscurity among the Free French Forces in French Equatorial Africa. Gradually, Clement’s cynicism and dedication to self-preservation at all costs is replaced by a sense of belonging and loyalty to the men who have been entrusted to his command, men who come to adore their leader’s stoicism and fearlessness in the face of adversity. Will Clement be allowed to continue with his new identity as Lt LaFarge and appreciation of life or will it be revealed that he is an imposter, a fraud, a murderer masquerading as a hero?

Clement’s anarchic loathing for authority, for country, his tendency to individualism and self-reliance to the point of misanthropy, could come from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s classic anti-war, anti-flag novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

‘People, countries, and objects all end up as smells.’

‘I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.’

Céline and Journey to the End of the Night are mentioned by Scorsese to Lee as one of the novels that informed his view of The Irishman.

‘There’s a quote towards the end [of the novel] where the main character gets killed. He’s talking with his girlfriend. She says, “What happened to you?: He says, “What happened to me is a whole life has happened to me”, and she shoots him. It’s a tough book. It’s ugly. When he says that, it hit me, he’s right. A whole life. Something I can never explain to you. You had to live it with me. You had to be me. That’s what we were trying to go for in the film.’

* Gabin didn’t take to Hollywood and its rigid studio system. Like Clement, he decided to fight for his country and left to join the Free French Forces. He fought in North Africa and then was part of the French 2nd Armoured Division that liberated Paris after D-Day.

Scorsese on trusting Cassavetes and not turning Mean Street into an exploitation flick

Great interview with Martin Scorsese talking about the making of Mean Streets (1973). Scorsese talks interestingly about many things, including the impact of John Cassavetes’ Shadows on Mean Streets; how Cassavetes gave Scorsese work on Minnie and Moskowitz; and advised the younger man to keep his distance from Roger Corman, for whom Scorsese had made Boxcar Bertha, and who wanted Scorsese to work on exploitation flicks (Corman even suggested that Scorsese make Mean Streets with a black cast to cash in on the blaxploitation fad). Richard Romanus who plays Michael in Mean Streets (and also played  Richard LaPenna in The Sopranos, a series indebted to Scorsese but whose gangsters, Scorsese reveals, he doesn’t understand) now lives on Skiathos and has written about relocating from Hollywood to Greece as well as penning a novel set during the Greek civil war.

Scorsese, Kazan and American ideology

Above is clip from A Letter to Elia, Martin Scorsese’s tribute to Greek-American film-maker Elia Kazan, most known for Panic in the Streets, Viva Zapata!, On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America, America; the latter being a reincarnation of his family’s journey from Anatolia to America, a journey that Kazan mythologises as one taken from slavery to freedom. Kazan’s espousal of this central myth of America, that it is a land of liberty and progress whereas the ‘Old World’ is a place of oppression stifled by tradition, is problematic and, in his work, only really affects America, America and, I suppose, to some extent, On the Waterfront; and, indeed, it’s difficult to know the degree to which Kazan believed in American ideology – in the documentary Kazan says criticism of America makes him ‘bristle’ – or whether he adopted it in order to justify, to himself as much as anyone else, his notorious decision to name names during the McCarthy communist witch hunts. For all its noisy championing of individual liberty, America places a higher value than Europe on conformism and a lesser one on dissidence and radical critique, which you would have thought a country as weird and destructive as America badly needs, especially from its thinking film-makers. 

See entire film here.