Customer Reviews

World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin, Vol. 1 - Tragic Drifter

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Exhaustively researched, exceptionally informative, incredibly entertaining...

If one is even casually acquainted with the films of Jean Gabin (and if you haven't seen "La Grande Illusion," it should be at the top of your Netflix queue), this is a must-read.

This book is exhaustive and incredibly entertaining. It suggests to me that a course on Gabin would make an excellent addition to film school curriculum because of the depth, breath and sheer entertainment value of so much of his work. I really enjoyed this book. I valued Gabin as an actor in some of my favorite films before reading it but now I really understand him as a man. Good work, Mr. Zigman.

Jean Gabin: World's Coolest Movie Star written by Charles Zigman is one of those one-of-a-kind books that everyone should have to reference. Mr. Charles Zigman skillfully reviews, comments, digests and provides little known facts about this amazing French film star, his life and his movies. The writing is compelling, strong and rich. This fast paced book should grace every coffee table in America, Europe & Asia.

After viewing all 24 hours of Jean Gabin's films that recently ran on Turner Classic Movies, I immediately jumped "the French Bogart" right up there with Toshiro Mifune to the top of my all-time list of great actors. There wasn't a clinker in the entire 13 film carload, and it left me wanting more, more, more!

And having just spent the last two days poring over the two volumes of "The World's Coolest Movie Star", I want add to the overall enthusiasm expressed by most of the reviewers here.

It's not perfect: There are a few plot details that are slightly misremembered, and IMO the author makes a bit too much of the "homoerotic" theme in "L'Air de Paris"---sometimes a friend is just a friend---but taken as a whole, this is a monumental achievement of both scholarship and fandom. Since most of Gabin's movies come without English subtitles, the author wound up hiring translators to view the movies with him and provide running translations. Talk about devotion!

There's absolutely nothing else in English on this tied-for-greatest of all actors, and AFAIC there's only one remaining task for the author to undertake: A companion volume on the films of Toshiro Mifune.

About five years ago, I happened to watch Jean Renoir's 1937 masterpiece "Grand Illusion" on Turner Classic Movies. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't know too much about the French movie star Jean Gabin before watching the film. (I knew Gabin's name, but I couldn't really associate him with too much, beyond the fact that the cartoon character 'Pepe Le Pew' was based upon a famous movie gangster Gabin had portrayed, Pepe Le Moko.) Anyway, for the last five years, I have been catching up on as many of Gabin's movies as I could -- particulary, I've become a fan of the actor's great classics ("La Bete humaine," "Le Jour se leve," "Touchez pas au grisbi"), but I love going onto eBay and finding some of the more 'rare' titles, as well. An incredible companion piece to this actor's great movies is author Charles Zigman's great and very welcome book "World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin. Not only does this two volume compendium feature an instantly compelling biography of France's most famous Golden Age movie star (I had heard once that Gabin and Marlene Dietrich dated in the forties, but I was not aware, until I read this book, that Dietrich considered Gabin to be the one true love of her life -- and of course, Dietrich dated everybody!), but there are chapters about all ninety-five of Gabin's films, which the author has seen and which his book presents to us in digest form. This is a neat idea, because, as Zigman states in his two volumes, more than half of Jean Gabin's films have never been subtitled into English due to the vagaries of the movie business, and so we can read about each film and feel like we're 'seeing it' -- even those titles which are not presently available for those of us who don't speak French to see.

I know that the First Edition of "World's Coolest Movie Star" was released last year, in 2008. I didn't buy it then, but I'm glad I waited a year, because the new Second Edition apparently adds a lot of new information, and it even apparently corrects a great deal of information from the previous edition. (For example, lately, I have enjoyed a 1937 film in which Gabin starred,called "Gueule d'amour;" in this new Second Edition, Zigman has provided a completely new chapter for this film, written 100% from scratch, as I believe he has done for eleven other titles.)

What I also like about this book, which has been beautifully designed by the artist Michael Kellner, is that one doesn't have to read it from beginning to end: One can pick it up anywhere and read about a film from 1976, a film from 1935, and a film from 1958. Another thing I admire about this book is that not only is it not "dry," but it is also the most completely exuberant film book I have read. Zigman wants us to admire Jean Gabin as much as he does, and his tone is superb. It's no wonder that this past week the book won First Place in the USA Book News Book Awards, in the Performing Arts category.

I recommend "World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin" very highly.

I received both volumes of Charles Zigman's phenomenal World's Coolest Movie Star last week, and I am utterly delighted. I grew up watching Jean Gabin's movies, and it was always a huge surprise to me that many others did not.

Zigman, who can really write (I'm anticipating whatever he does next), spends a great deal of time on all ninety-five of Gabin's movies, and he's really doing a great service to cineastes who want to learn more about this wonderful movie personality, only a few of whose films have ever existed in America.

This project is a labor of love, and these books are beautifully designed. If you know anybody who enjoys older films, it seems like this would be the ideal gift to give them.

The Greatest Movie Star of all time... outside the English speaking world - "World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films(and Legend) of Jean Gabin" is a look at one of the best film actors the world has ever known which spanned nearly fifty years, and a war hero, husband, father, and farmer on top of all that. Covering his life and career in completion, author Charles Zigman introduces him to the English speaking world, where he holds quite the cult following, as best as he can, and leaves no detail to the reader's imagination. "World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin" is a must for any serious collection dedicated to film and cinema.

The author's attempt at a chatty, "fun" take on Gabin and his films leads this to be a very puzzling, unsatisfying, not to say maddening book.

There are only a few pages of biography at the beginning, although some Gabin stories are interspersed among the weird, discursive plot rehashes of each film that take up the bulk of the book. There are so many factual errors in the author's retelling of the plots (in practically every paragraph) that it sometimes seems questionable if he even bothered to watch parts of the films. His puerile sex obsession at times leads him to completely misinterpret the meaning of some films.

The author doesn't even seem to have a clear mental picture of his subject, describing Gabin as "swarthy," "strapping," "barrel-chested" and "5 feet 10."

At least twice he notes that the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pépé le Pew is based on Gabin in "Pépé le Moko" when the most cursory Google search reveals that it was Charles Boyer in "Algiers." This is strange because he even mentions the Boyer version of the film.

Michele Morgan's "forward" consists of ONE paragraph. The book is well-designed and contains some nice photographic reproductions, although they are on the same uncoated stock as the text. There is no index or bibliography, in Volume One, at least.

In July 2008, I bought the First Edition of Charles Zigman's "World's Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin. I enjoyed it very much. This year, the newly revised and expanded Second Edition was released, and it's really a revelation. Zigman provided an email address in the First Edition and invited readers to send in their comments and criticisms; this new Second Edition, which was released in October of 2009, is a reflection of Zigman's "collaboration" with his readers, and he really put in a lot of work. Not only has Zigman painstakingly revised the tone of the entire book -- I noticed changes on every page of both volumes -- he's also re-written twelve of the individual filmography chapters from scratch. I also noticed a few extra photographs and even some additional biographical information: For example, Zigman now mentions, in the newest edition of his book, that in the early 1950's, Gabin participated in a legendary radio broadcast with the musician Leo Ferre. This book is obviously a labor of love and it's one of the best film-related books I've ever read. Kudos to Zigman for bringing the wonderful Jean Gabin to the attention of English-speaking readers everywhere.

Last week, I received both volumes of author Charles Zigman's stellar new work WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR, THE COMPLETE 95 FILMS (AND LEGEND) OF JEAN GABIN, and I am mightily impressed. This book is an incredible companion to the ninety-five major films of the great, iconic actor, and the best thing about it, is that you can read it from beginning to end, and folllow the trajectory of the actor's career, or you can open it to any random chapter and read, individually, about each film. I really enjoy the tone with which Zigman writes: Zigman understands that Gabin is not as well known in America as he should be, or as he is throughout the rest of the world, so the way he makes you excited about Gabin, is to write his book in a consistently amusing, colloquial, "fresh" tone which really makes you want to run out and see Gabin's movies -- the tone is a fabulous way to "dust" off old movies and make them seem fresh. Since maybe two-thirds of Gabin's films are unavailable in the United States (the distribution of foreign-language films, in America, has always been rather spotty, especially when it comes to genre pictures), Zigman runs through each film's plot and major theme with great accuracy, so you can feel, as an English-speaking reader, that you're watching films which you have never been able to see, on a firsthand basis. Both volumes of WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR are teeming with interesting anecdotes and biographical facts about Jean Gabin, as well as prodigious excerpts from original newspaper reviews of each film and great photographs. (How did Zigman pull this together? Amazing!) Indeed, WORLD'S COOLEST MOVIE STAR is bursting with entertainment. It is fun, readable, enjoyable and -- yes -- it also happens to be a staggering work of great, sharp-minded scholarship.