Gérard Blain

Biography: life and films

If Gérard Blain had wanted it, he could have become one of the biggest French movie stars of his generation. He had the looks, he had the charisma, he had the breaks - and yet stardom was not in his DNA. All he wanted was to make a statement, to express his contempt for modern values and come to the defence of those old-fashioned virtues which he believed were essential for personal well-being and societal cohesion. This he could never achieve as an actor, so he became a filmmaker, and, whilst he had little commercial success, he stuck to what he believed was his métier, living up to his James Dean image as a rebel constantly at war with a world he was mostly appalled by. Gérard Blain is still better known as an actor - mainly through his brief flirtation with the French New Wave - but once you have seen some of the films he directed you realise that his real talents were behind the camera.

Gérard Blain's early life was far from happy. Born in Paris on 23rd October 1930, his father, an important architect, abandoned him and his family when he was a young boy. He quit school at the age of 13 when France was under Nazi Occupation and became a child of the street, even getting mixed up with the French Resistance. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, who struggled to keep the family together, and sought independence by getting work where he could. He was employed as an extra in several films of this period, including Léo Joannon's Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (1944) and Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and found work as a stable boy. Later he became a jockey and a boxer, without any success. He was 25, minding his own business in a café on the Champs-Elysées, when a stranger approached him and opened a conversation with him, which ended with the offer of a small role in a film. The stranger was Julien Duvivier, the film was Voici le temps des assassins (1956), and Gérard Blain's acting career had just begun.

Blain's sober presence in Duvivier's film struck a chord with a young critic named François Truffaut, who invited him to take the lead male role in his first film - a short entitled Les Mistons (1957). Blain agreed, although it was his wife at the time, Bernadette Lafont, who ended up monopolising Truffaut's attention and became the film's centrepiece. The phrase 'Nouvelle vague' had yet to be coined before Blain was hired by a friend of Truffaut's Claude Chabrol, to play a leading role, alongside Jean-Claude Brialy, in what was to become the first film of the French New Wave - Le Beau Serge (1958). Blain made such an impact as a pathetic rural alcoholic that Chabrol immediately cast him with Brialy in his next film, Les Cousins (1959). The success of these two films instantly made Blain's name as an actor and it wasn't long after that he was in Hollywood, working alongside John Wayne on Howard Hawks' Hatari (1962). International stardom and mega salaries were just around the corner.

Blain's sojourn in Hollywood was not what he had hoped for. The star system, particularly the power that this gave actors over their directors, horrified him to such an extent that he refused to sign a Hollywood contract. Disillusioned, Blain hastily made the return trip across the Atlantic and contented himself with a modest wage in low-budget Italian and French productions. In the 1960s, he quietly faded into the background, eschewing stardom for the quieter life of the jobbing actor, in such films as Carlo Lizzani's Il gobbo (1960), Francesco Maselli's I delfini (1960), Silvio Siano's Lo sgarro (1962) and Jean-Pierre Mocky's Les Vierges (1963). But even this did not satisfy Blain - acting just didn't suit him. He soon came to resent being a puppet, performing for public amusement and not having a voice of his own.

By the early 1970s, Gérard Blain was angry enough to start making his own films. He made his directing debut with Les Amis (1971), a strange and provocative film depicting an intimate relationship between a teenage boy and a much older man. For someone who would later be branded homophobic it seems an odd choice of subject for a first-time filmmaker but it allowed Blain to confront one of his own personal bugbears, the absence of a father figure in his own life. The film has some obvious autobiographical content but what is most striking about it is its composition. With its beautifully constructed tableaux and appealing lack of artifice, Les Amis shows the influence of Blain's own cinematic idols Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu. The film met with some critical acclaim and received the Golden Leopard for the best first work at the Locarno Film Festival, but it was not a commercial success.

Encouraged by the critical reaction to his first film, Blain persevered. Le Pélican (1973) is a powerfully moving saga about paternal love depicting an estranged father driven by an insane urge to be reunited with his son. Then came Blain's masterpiece, Un enfant dans la foule (1976), a breathtakingly honest and perceptive portrait of childhood that was closely based on the director's own experiences at the time of the Occupation. Again, Blain provoked the censors with some blatant allusions to paedophilia, but, taking his cue from Bresson, he delivers another sublimely crafted slice of life that engages the emotions with what can only be described as a tender ferocity.

In his next film, Un second souffle (1978), Blain turns to the subject of midlife crisis and offers another thinly veiled self-portrait in Robert Stack's portrayal of a fifty-something dentist walking out on his wife to start a new bachelor life with a younger woman. More interesting is Blain's subsequent Le Rebelle (1980), the director's most overtly political offering in which a young man from the suburbs goes to war with the world when the state and the capitalist system both fail him. Pierre et Djemila (1986) is an updated version of Romeo and Juliet, transposed to modern day Roubaix, which was seen by some to be racist - a view that had more to do with Blain's unfortunate association with some members of the National Front than the film itself.

Blain was already succumbing to the cancer that would soon kill him when he embarked on his final film, Ainsi soit-il (2000). Released nine months before its director's death, this stark revenge drama was honoured with a Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Film Festival. Gérard Blain spent the last decade of his life trying and failing to clear his debts, but he remained committed to his ideals and his refusal to make any concession to what he considered the tawdry exigences of commercial filmmaking. He lived long enough to appreciate the critical recognition of his final film before dying on 17th December 2000 at the age of 70. It is true that Blain was far more prolific as an actor than he was as a director, with over seventy film and television credits to his name. But it was as a film director that he achieved what he wanted - to exorcise his own personal demons and express his revulsion for the moral decline that he witnessed in his lifetime. In time, Gérard Blain may come to be regarded as one of the great auteur filmmakers of his generation, but at the moment his work is too cruelly overlooked.

Filmography

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