La belle équipe

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.

Made at the time when the Popular Front was about to happen,"la belle équipe" perfectly captured the thirties zeitgeist.This was a very optimistic time,and no one could have forecast what would occur in the years to come:1936 Summer saw the first paid vacations .

Jean Gabin was THE French actor of this era,the one who embodied almost everything the audience was dreaming of.Here he plays an employed man,who,with five mates ,wins on the raffle :they decide to buy a guinguette (a café on the banks of the Seine river where you can drink wine and dance).The guinguettes have now completely disappeared in France but it must have been many a Parisian's dream at least till early sixties:just hear the song Gabin sings (he's not dubbed,he used to cut records all along his acting career)telling about fun "quand on s'promène au bord de l'eau" (when go for a stroll along the riverside).There's an almost identical sung sequence in "sous le ciel de Paris"(1952).The guinguettes are part of the past French cinema:Jean Renoir's "une partie de campagne" described them as if he were a painter;ditto the beginning of Jacques Becker's masterpiece "Casque d'or"(1952)which magnificently captured their atmosphere.In "voici le temps des assassins" (1956),his film noir extraordinaire,Duvivier showed a darker side of the guinguettes .

This dark side is already present in "la belle équipe" .Leftish French critics said that the optimistic ending (the team succeeds)was released in the popular theaters ,and the doomed one(the team fails) was shown in chic ones .Modern historians generally do not agree.Duvivier's choice was certainly the pessimist conclusion:it could not be any other way when you know his work,one of the most somber of the French cinema. It must have been filmed first,then the producers asked him to sweeten the screenplay:they were not completely wrong,on account of the historical background.Nowadays,French TV show the two endings in a row.

"La belle équipe" is brimming with camaraderie,joie de vivre and vie en rose.With its happy end ,it's a true oasis,a truce before the flood.Subsequent works such as "carnet de bal" and "la fin du jour" will blight all hopes.

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.

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.