Sous le signe du taureau

When it was released,the movie was slagged off as cinema de papa ,old hat ,you name it; Okay Gabin's great films ,it's Carné,Duvivier and Renoir ! But it does not mean that the other ones are all turkeys. In 1969, the person who would go and see a Gabin movie was par excellence the guy who had not got a clue about the true cinema ,the meaningful one ,and he was despised by the highbrows.

Gilles Grangier is Saturday-night-at the-movie style ,and he knows the tricks of the trade; a good craftsman who would give the people what they wanted .And when he'd got a writer such as Michel Audiard at hand , his movies were often enjoyable .

An industrialist,who studied at the Ecole Centrale (prestigious college of engineering) , sees his latest rocket explode and his business in jeopardy.

Gabin seems cast against type but his persona is not far away: when he has launched his rocket, he goes straight to the bistro ; he was certainly born a prole and he succeeded by himself with a hard work or scholarships ; he is not at ease with his peers (his brother-in-law hates him)who ,after his failure,wait for his fall .Everyone turns their back on him,no one answers his phone calls ......

It's not an action-packed film , but rather a wandering through a world where the hero was reluctantly accepted ;filmed partly in Rouen ,notably on a scrapyard whose owner cashed in on all sides during the war.

The biggest flaw is the wife's final deus ex machina .But the great Suzanne Flon makes it worthwhile ; Gabin gets strong support from the excellent supporting cast (Michel Auclair, Alfred Adam,even Fernand Ledoux ) .True to himself , that is to say surlier than ever,it's the French audience's beloved Gabin.

As with La Horse, shot around the same time, you have to wonder if they had enough of a story when they end up with a mere 75-minute runtime. And the opening credits are slow, and boring! Jean Gabin plays the tired stubborn patriarch part he indulged in for most of the last 20 years of his career. It may be OK when there is something of a story, or when emotions, or laughs, are carried by the rest of the cast too. Here Gabin is in freewheeling mode more than ever. He is in turn tired, angry, passive-aggressive, sarcastic and even sometimes hypocritically gentle. The succession of moods gives us a mostly uninteresting character that the script would want us to accept as a maverick, a passionate fatalistic lone-ranger in a world of cynical and material hypocrites.

Sure Gabin has to cope with very little help from the script and director. Audiard's dialogue cannot make up for the lack of overall production quality. A lighter atmosphere might have resounded greatly with a couple of rants and one-liners, but here they ring wrong because they are the words of a bitter man you never come to root for.

There is a complete battalion of fine actors around Gabin though. They really lift up the whole thing around the old man's tired part; so much that in the end you really wonder how much real work it took the production guys to land so little drama.