Two Pépés: Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer ... and a third

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Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for many subsequent decades, Jean Gabin was the most popular movie star in France. Starting at about the same time, another French-born actor, Charles Boyer, who had first worked in the United States at the coming of sound, reached the peak of his Hollywood stardom. Both of them enjoyed great international success before the outbreak of World War II, Gabin in the prestigious art films of Jean Renoir (La Grande illusion [1937], La Bête humaine [1938]) and of Marcel Carné (Quai des brumes [1938], Le Jour se lève [1939]), Boyer in movies addressed to mass audiences, the French-made Mayerling (1937) and in Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939). Boyer, the elder by five years, was born in 1899 and died in 1978, two years before Gabin. They made their last films in 1976, crowning professional lives of extraordinary length.

In the U.S., Charles Boyer, marketed as “the Great Lover” in romantic films that called for Continental charm, was also acknowledged as a superb actor (four "Oscar" nominations). His roles tested him in a wide range of roles, mostly as sympathetic characters, attentive to his female co-stars, charming, well-mannered, occasionally tormented (All This and Heaven Too [1940], Confidential Agent [1945]), and once villainous (the murderer in Gaslight [1944]). He was praised for his New York stage appearances in works by Sartre, Shaw, and several sophisticated comedies between the late 1940s and early 1960s. Gabin began singing and dancing in the music hall and found his screen persona in La Bandéra (1935) as the marginalized, idealistic man of the people, quick to anger, a victim of society. Suave Boyer and bad-boy Gabin proved irresistible to women.

The parallel trajectories of these two actors intersect in a single role they both played, first Gabin in 1937, the following year Boyer. The success of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, the film that made Gabin an international star, prompted American producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to the film, reuse the score and much of the footage, duplicate the staging and the decor, and translate the dialogue. (My next post will be devoted to a comparison of the two films.) With a new title, Algiers, Wanger’s retread, directed by John Cromwell, served as the American debut of Hedy Lamarr. Pépé cemented Boyer’s stellar rank just as it had Gabin’s. For years, the French actor’s legion of comic impersonators echoed a line never heard in the film—“Come wiz me to the Casbah”—vainly trying to sound Boyer’s inimitably seductive bass timbre.

Despite the similarity of the set-ups in the French film and its Hollywood remake, the individual allure of each Pépé emerges clearly. In the intimacy of the final encounter between the gangster, sheltered in the Casbah of Algiers, eager to break free, to return to Paris with the gorgeous woman with whom he has fallen in love, we hear Gabin’s mixture of bravado and passion. The French dialogue, most of which you will hear translated in the Boyer clip, connects Pépé’s infatuation for Gaby to his obsession for Paris. Gaby is played by Mireille Ballin, his glamorous co-star in Jean Grémillon’s 1937 Gueule d’amour.  

Boyer is smoother, a bit more refined, but no less persuasive of Pépé’s need to be with Gaby, who embodies his escape from Algiers. And as Gaby, Hedy Lamarr is no less entranced by her desire for Pépé than was Mireille Ballin.

The contrasting styles of Boyer and Gabin are more striking in films made at approximately the same time. In Quai des brumes, Gabin, playing Jean, a character similar to Pépé, a deserter with an overwhelming need to to escape--here from France, needs little time and few words to convince Michèle Morgan’s Nelly that he loves her.

In this sequence from Frank Borzage’s breathtakingly romantic History Is Made at Night (1937), Boyer’s Paul moves incrementally from light-hearted banter to a wordless declaration of love in a night-long tango with Jean Arthur’s Irene. Again, the authenticity of the character’s feeling and the candor written in his eyes exert their power over his co-star and the movie spectator.

 

With the title Casbah, Pépé le Moko had yet another Hollywood remake in 1948. Tailored to the prodigious musical talents of Tony Martin, it boasted a Harold Arlen score. Singing “It Was Written in the Stars” to the Gaby of Marta Toren, Martin’s silken timbre is undefeated by the static of this clip.

Conquest (1937): Garbo talks … and talks

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Here is the trailer for Conquest, one of the MGM’s major productions. Released in 1937, Conquest suffered the biggest loss of any of the studio’s movies from the 1920s to the 1940s: budget $2,732,000, gross $2,141,000.

Conquest was Greta Garbo’s last appearance in a romantic melodrama, the genre that made her the cinema’s most prestigious star. Her two remaining roles were in comedies, Ninotchka (1939), a great success, and Two Faced Woman (1941), a clamorous failure. The latter brought her career to a premature end.

Garbo’s final lines in Conquest are “Don’t talk, Alexandre, just now. He has a star to follow. Let us pray that it may bring him peace.”

 

A moment later, she (as Maria Walewska) and little Scotty Beckett (as her son, Alexandre) weakly wave farewell to figurerines of Charles Boyer and a little boat—Napoleon going into exile. We silently applaud her request for silence since words (supplied by reputable screenwriters Samuel Hoffenstein, Salka Viertel, and S. N. Behrman) have both literally and figuratively engulfed images all through the film. Yet Garbo is not permitted to take her own advice. She is made to articulate the prayer that is best seen unsaid. This is emblematic of what I find disappointing in Conquest. Garbo is presumably mediating for us an act of renunciation, showing us how to give up, to take leave, to let go, as she does so memorably in Mata Hari (facing a French firing squad), Grand Hotel (joyously leaving the eponymous hotel, unaware that her lover is dead), Queen Christina (her seemingly impassive face held in a thirty-second-long closeup), and Camille (fading out of life and frame, the ultimate goodbye). Here, in Conquest, this actress, the incarnation of farewells, is made to speak an excess of sententious, moralizing dialogue.

A great opportunity was lost in Conquest, a film that paired Garbo with a worthy co-star, Charles Boyer. As he proved in films with Dunne, Arthur, Dietrich, Davis, and so many others, the concentration of “the Great Lover” bestows as much flattering attention on a leading lady as does the most loving camera lens. In the melodramas Garbo made in the sound era, Herbert Marshall, in The Painted Veil, is the only other actor able to match her emotional, visual, and aural harmonies. But in Conquest, like Garbo herself, Boyer is often undercut by the awkward context and verbiage.

And yet Garbo’s first appearance in the film is one of most striking of her career. She is leered at by the meanest bunch of Cossacks who ever raped and pillaged, and through their blatantly lustful eyes the sense of Garbo as pristine surface is violated. She holds no mystery for men who have already transformed luxurious furniture into firewood, and have filled a piano with hay for their horses. It is always shocking to see Garbo in a crowd and here our spectatorship is provocatively tested by this collection of would-be rapists. The film thus acknowledges Garbo’s value as an object both for contemplation and for possession.

Another kind of scrutiny, at the grand ball in honor of Napoleon, is skillfully staged on a set that seems as appropriate for Eleanor Powell’s dance routines as for the ceremonial deployment of the emperor and his soon-to-be mistress. Seated on a dais, Boyer searches the crowd for Garbo through his lorgnette. The ranks of dress extras obediently part, opening telescopic paths for the imperious gaze that Garbo attempts to elude. As Boyer’s eyes clear the way to Garbo, she constantly makes him redirect his stare as well as ours. This model of form and variation is immediately exploited in the ensuing dance sequence when Boyer subverts protocol to continue partnering Garbo.

(N.B: the above still has been colorized; the film is in black and white)

The formality of the dance is modified by the will of the emperor, and suitably so in a film where the actor as emperor rules through his eyes. And the reorganizing will that disrupts and then reconstitutes the patterns of a crowd and a formal dance will reorganize the feelings of Maria Walewska, first transforming her patriotic love for the savior of Europe into love for Napoleon the man. Later, he capitalizes on that love to make his mistress accept his betrayal, and his ultimate marriage to his ambition.

The ballroom sequence is the last in Conquest in which a sustained directorial effort of mise-en-scène foregrounds the cinematic rather than the merely pictorial. From this point on, Garbo and Boyer will be only faintly animated by a dynamics of visual inquiry. The remaining scenes and shots are like the illustrations we find in 19^th-century editions of novels, skillfully shaded plates that freeze and label significant moments.

We should perhaps not complain about illustrations as lovely as some of those in Conquest: Garbo in dark velvet, Boyer over her shoulder, confusion about love and patriotism flickering on her face and in the framing candelabrum; on a wintry terrace, the simplicity of her surrender, her presence fascinatingly de-eroticized by a white shawl (shown in the trailer); Garbo slumped on her knees, Boyer striding through the set, trying to justify his marriage of state to a Hapsburg princess.

Yet shots such as these are just as detached from Conquest as those lonely plates, usually unnumbered, and overwhelmingly outnumbered in word-filled novels. Nothing in the structure of Conquest sustains its “beautiful” moments. It is as if the film’s rhythm were controlled by the intermittent turning of pages rather than the regular succession of frames. Insistent titles—“Two years later”—“Two years later”—are meant to convey a semblance of historical accuracy, a rhythm contrary to the way we are meant to view the greatest movie stars. In its refusal of visual challenges, Conquest represents a loss of faith in images of paradox. Instead, it offers us a straightforward, reductive history lesson embedded in a format of “show and tell.” And the leading lady does not even get to speak the movie’s best lines. In a delicious encounter between Boyer and Maria Ouspenskaya, the vocal virtuosity of the performers nicely scrambles Moscow, Paris, and Hollywood. Their Franco-Russian duet ranges over cheating a cards, empire building, time, identity, and lunatic asylums. Well-written, civilized, and very funny, this exchange, and many subsequent one-liners, “tell” us how much everyone responsible for Conquest believed in the power of dialogue. But neither script nor direction favor the flux, the playing against the grain that elsewhere makes Garbo an animating presence as well as an object of reference. In her most successful films, the portrait-like closeups are the sum of previous visual activity, of artful collaborations between actress, cameraman, director, and, on rare occasions, co-star.

Conquest should not to be totally dismissed. It is impossible to fail with a shot of Garbo sagging under the weight of love and history, of Boyer manic with ambition or bloated with world-weariness, or with any frame that contains two faces such as theirs. But such frames are the most precious pages in an album that seems to have been organized for its captions rather than its images.