La belle équipe

One for nostalgia buffs. One of a handful of movies that epitomise French cinema in the thirties. Gabin, Charles Vanel and Viviane Romance proved durable, indeed, Romance was something of a French Jeanne Crain/Linda Darnell in the forties while Vanel scored heavily in La Salaire du Peur and Les Diaboliques. Gabin, of course, proved most durable and iconic; this was made around the time of Pepe Le Moko and still to come were Quai des Brumes, Le jour se leve, and then the great post-war stuff, Touchez pas au grisbi, Le Chat, La Traversee de Paris,etc. First and last this is a Depression movie, made and released in the heart of the international slump. But it's also about comaraderie, how strong it is yet how fragile. When they don't have change of a match the 5 friends ARE strong but once they hit the numbers on the National Lottery it all begins to crumble from the inside. It's a curious mixture of the lyrical - the pastoral scenes along the Marne that would be echoed in Casque d'Or, the sentimental songs, and Gabin in full throat is something to hear - and the pragmatic - money corrupts and frailty, thy name is woman - but against the odds it works. Duvivier doesn't get too much attention today yet he remains a key player in French cinema.

But its well done, written, played. Good story line. But 75 years is a long time.

The film that became the emblem of the Popular Front does not really present its ideology, on the contrary. Duvivier asserts social determinism, cuts down on solidarity, as if any social dream were impossible. Duvivier keeps the freshness, not the ideal. It doesn't matter if he uses shortcuts that are not very credible. What remains are the shots on the Marne.

La Belle Equipe / They Were Five (1936): Brief Review -

A fairly realistic take on human greed, friendship and money, which works more with the re-shot optimistic ending than the pessimistic one. Julien Duvivier's Pepe Le Moko with Jean Jabin came the next year, but fortunately, this one realistic film was saved by the negative shades of that poetic surrealism. La Belle Equipe comes out with a funny and lighthearted film first and then turns serious. Like every other known French film of that time, it has that disastrous love angle/triangle, but is survived by the idealistic endings. So, the film has two endings: the first one is pessimistic, and it's covered with jealousy and foolish romance that didn't work for me. The second one is positive, where the femme fatale is defeated by friendship, and I liked this one better. My rating will go straight half a mark down for the negative ending and half a mark up for the optimistic one that I liked (it's final). Still, there are some flaws in the film, as it drags unnecessarily despite a short runtime of 100 minutes (including both endings). Like I said, it has that foolish romance to hurt the intelligence, and it's too annoying for a revolutionary French cinema of that time. Well, that's the case with many Jean Gabin and Jean Renoir films of that time; maybe it's just me who thinks otherwise. Anyways, the film makes a fine one-time watch to learn about French ethics of the 30s, as the storyline is very close to reality. 5 friends win a lottery, and their friendship is tested while they use the money to make themselves well-settled. The performances are decent, the screenplay is a bit problematic, and Julien Duvivier's direction is strictly okay. Actually, topics like human greed and jealousy in love triangles have become dated by the mid-30s, so I don't really think there is anything extraordinary here.

RATING - 6.5/10*

By - #samthebestest.

When a movie has practically no plot, as is the case for "La Belle Equipe", you at least hope/expect that character development will be its strong suit. But most of the characters here are hollow, with only Jean Gabin standing out (he commands the screen more than any other cast member, with only Viviane Romance giving him any competition). There are hardly any visual innovations as well - like there were in an earlier Julien Duvivier film ("Moon Over Morocco") which also revolved around 5 male friends. In one word, skippable. ** out of 4.