Miroir (1947)
Directed by Raymond Lamy

Film Review

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...  One of the most fascinating aspects of Jean Gabin, arguably France's most iconic screen actor, is how drastically his screen persona altered in the 1940s.  In the decade leading up to the outbreak of WWII, he had built a solid acting career in the guise of a popular working class hero, his 'Titi parisien' mannerisms and almost feminine sensitivity making him an ideal casting choice for the roles of humane down-to-earth losers in films as diverse as Jean Renoir's Les Bas-fonds (1936) and Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939).  Gabin retained the clubbable persona of his early years as a music hall song and dance man, but there was also an unmistakable air of vulnerability, making him ideal for the fatalist poetic-realist melodramas of Carné, Julien Duvivier and Jean Grémillon - Le Quai des brumes (1938), Pépé le Moko (1937) and Gueule d'amour (1937).

By the mid-1950s, Gabin's screen image and acting style had changed completely - to the point that he appeared to be a totally different man.  This was most apparent in his physical bearing and body language - he was stiffer, less expressive in his movements, and this gave him a dangerously intense, powerful quality on screen - like a tightly wound spring or a deadly tiger ready to pounce.  When he spoke, it was often in a flat, business-like manner tinged with sarcasm or cynicism, aggression breaking through in sudden dramatic bursts.  Gone was the gentle romantic and amiable drinking buddy; in its place was a more aloof man who had clearly seen too much of life, had had too many of his illusions shattered to have any inclination to look on the sunnier side.

This transformation did not happen overnight but developed across the 1940s, as can be seen from the handful of (mostly forgotten) films that Gabin made during this, his least productive decade.  If there was a decisive turning point, this was most likely during Gabin's ill-conceived attempt to make it big in Hollywood after he fled his native France at the start of the Nazi Occupation.  In the two films he made in America - Archie Mayo's Moontide (1942) and Duvivier's The Impostor (1944) - Gabin shows a noticeable departure from what had gone before, his more wooden, laconic persona the result of his difficulty in speaking in a language that was not his own.  It was only when he resumed his career in France after the war that the change was unmistakable.  In the interim, Gabin had seen fierce combat action during the war, putting his life on the line many times in the Allied campaign to liberate France from the Nazis (for which he received the Croix de Guerre).  This brush with mortality and its attendant horrors surely played a significant part in 'toughening up' the actor, both physically and emotionally, as well as altering his moral outlook.

Gabin's first role in a French film after the war - the gloomy noir melodrama Martin Roumagnac (1946) - showed him to be a more taciturn and moodier version of his former self - not too dissimilar to the schizoid character he had played in Renoir's La Bête humaine (1938) (his grimmest pre-WWII role), but with a far darker, much more dangerous edge.  Audiences must have been truly shocked by the Gabin they saw at the end of this film - so frighteningly expressive of man's innate savagery, brutally red in tooth and claw.  It was in his next film - Raymond Lamy's little-known crime drama Miroir - that the totally remodelled actor - the Jean Gabin of the 1950s onwards - is first fully revealed to us.

A sluggish noir B-movie overly in thrall to its cordite-infused American counterpart, Miroir is among Gabin's least known and most underrated films, yet it marks a crucial phase in the actor's development.  It was here that Gabin created the 'Grand Patron' persona, the unblinking Godfather-type, that would predominate in the latter half of his career.  The new personality would inhabit many forms - the complacent society patriarch with more iron than tenderness in his soul, the hard-as-nails gangster boss with a Rottweiler temperament towards his rivals and the obsessively driven police chief who is more than capable of stepping outside the law to reach what he believes to be the right moral outcome.  Miroir allows Gabin to adopt the first two of these well-defined archetypes - the merciless crime lord and esteemed society figure - and make them two contrasting facets of the same character.  In doing so, he turns in one of his most fascinating and complex screen portrayals - in spite of a fairly uneven script that relies too heavily on caricature and cliché to be entirely satisfying.

Inspired by the real-life story of the notorious pre-WWII French gangster Alphonse Lecroq, Miroir harks back to the glorious American gangster films of the 1930s - William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) and Mervyn LeRoy's Little Ceasar (1931) being two obvious points of reference.  Adopting many of the characteristics of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson's contrasting takes on the Prohibition era hoodlum, Gabin appears worryingly at home in the Jekyll and Hyde role of a psychotic crime boss masquerading as a smoothly respectable member of France's haute bourgeoisie.  Max le Menteur, the character that Gabin played so memorably in Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) - a major landmark in French film noir - is a close cousin of the dual-natured character he inhabits so comfortably in Miroir.

Steeped in blood and the filthiest of ill-gotten lucre, Gabin's character Lussac ought to come across as a figure of outright contempt, but oddly this is not how we see him.  A brief flashback to an earlier stage of Lussac's life reveals him to be exactly what we might have expected: a failed idealist who found it too easy to take the dark path after his illusions had deserted him.  The Gatsby-like financier/crime boss comes across as being far more respectable than the starched hypocrites and parasites that swarm around him, members of a class that is polite enough never to ask exactly where Lussac's immense wealth comes from as they hold out their expectant hands and bask in his reflected glory.  Miroir is interesting in that it anticipates not only the hardboiled French gangster movie (most notably Jules Dassin's Du rififi chez les hommes, 1955) and associated films policiers of the next few decades, but also the mordant anti-bourgeois offerings of Luis Buñuel and Claude Chabrol.

In his one and only outing as a solo director, Raymond Lamy does a pretty effective job at laying the foundation for what would become one of the mainstay genres of French cinema, spicing up the lethargically paced narrative with some impressively staged action set-pieces, the highpoint being the climactic graveyard shoot-out at the end of the film, with the gangster boss falling dead into a freshly dug grave (no doubt a humorous dig at the inherent fatalism of classic film noir).  These, together with an expansive boxing match sequence - spookily prefiguring Mark Robson's The Harder they Fall (1956) - bring an arresting modernity to what would otherwise have been a generally tepid morality film.  For the bulk of his career, Lamy was employed as an editor, most frequently for such esteemed directors as Georges Lacombe (L'Escalier sans fin, Le Pays sans étoiles) and Sacha Guitry (La Poison, Tu m'as sauvé la vie, Napoléon), but he also served as an assistant director on a handful of films including Lacombe's Martin Roumagnac and Marcel Pagnol's La Belle Meunière (1948).

For such an under-appreciated film, Miroir has a surprisingly starry cast-list, with rising star Daniel Gélin heading a supporting cast of exceptional quality.  At the time, Gélin had already taken the place of the handsome romantic lead that Gabin had solidly occupied throughout much of the 1930s, so its seems fitting that the actors should appear on screen at this crucial stage in their respective careers as son and father (albeit with a nasty plot twist).  Whilst Gélin's character is ostensibly the more moral of the two men, he is ultimately shown to be just as ethically deficient - he has no qualms over acquiring a place in respectable society through his father's illicit wealth and seems mightily relieved when his ties to his ignoble benefactor are abruptly severed before any undue embarrassment comes his way.  In Gélin's sanctimonious Charles Lussac and his sickeningly complacent entourage we see in outline form the long line of appalling bourgeois hypocrites populating the films of Claude Chabrol.

The film's other stand-out performance is supplied by a stunning Colette Mars, who, as the sultry ex-mistress pining to rekindle a spent passion, is the most sympathetic character, her life's tragedy powerfully evoked in the nightclub musical number she renders with such depth of feeling.  Gabrielle Dorziat provides a few shots of badly needed humour as the cantankerous mother-in-law-from-hell, whose face screams 'I always knew you were a bad 'un' every time she deigns to cast her milk-curdling gaze in Gabin's direction.  And then there's Martine Carol, working her sensually seductive magic as a boxer's girlfriend, four years before Richard Pottier's Caroline chérie made her France's biggest sex symbol.  Catherine Deneuve's father, Maurice Dorléac, crops up in a minor role, along with the singer Michel Sardou's father Fernand and fondly remembered character actors Henri Crémieux, Henri Poupon and Sylvie.

Critical reaction to Miroir on its first release in May 1947 was not particularly favourable and its modest audience of 1.8 million (well below what earlier Gabin films had achieved) led it to be written off as a failure.  Let down somewhat by a lack of consistency in both the writing and direction (although there are a few moments of exquisite brilliance), the film was unlikely to stand the test of time, even with its high calibre cast.  However, in defining both the future direction of Gabin's career and the French crime-thriller genre its significance cannot be overstated.  Miroir lives up to its name in ways that its authors could never have imagined, for it is like a looking glass in which we can clearly discern not only the newly re-invented Jean Gabin - the patriarch of Les Grandes familles, ruthless drugs supremo of Razzia sur la chnouf and reformed convict of Les Misérables - but also the realist gritty thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville, Georges Lautner, Jacques Deray and many others of the 1950s onwards.

Film Synopsis

A prominent figure in the world of high finance, Pierre Lussac appears to be the model French citizen.  He has wealth, influence and the unwavering admiration of the bourgeois set to which he belongs.  Such success might have corrupted a lesser man, made him mean and selfish, but not Lussac.  Here is a man who dazzles with his munificence, liberally dispensing large sums of money to any worthy cause that comes his way.  How proud he is of his son Charles, who is set to follow his example as he embarks on a promising career as a lawyer and marries into another rich family.  But there is far more to Pierre Lussac than first meets the eye.  Unbeknown to his family, business associates and hoard of admirers he has a darker, far more sinister side...

Nicknamed 'Mirror', Pierre Lussac is in truth the head of one of France's most notorious criminal gangs, hunted by the police and feared by his enemies for his cold-blooded ruthlessness.  His respectable life in high society is nothing more than a cover for his staggering range of illicit activities. He isn't even Charles's real father!  The man who has that honour is a criminal partner of his, Monsieur Ruffaut, who was compelled to place the boy into Lussac's care in early infancy.  Lussac has little love for his real family - not his prim wife Anna, nor his bossy mother-in-law Madame Puc.  He prefers the company of his seductive former mistress Cléo, a singer in a popular nightclub who dreams of rekindling their erstwhile passion.

For over a decade, Lussac has managed to keep his two lives well apart but they are destined to come into fierce collision when his gang goes to war with a rival criminal outfit in Marseille.  As his world begins to fall apart, Pierre is forced to break the news to Charles that he is not his father - a revelation that comes as a relief to the young man who is only concerned with his own future prospects.  The gangland war escalates dramatically and Lussac, his double identity exposed, is ineluctably drawn towards a violent showdown with his gun-toting rivals.  In a graveyard, with a funeral under way, the gangster boss takes his final stand against his vengeful enemies.  It just so happens there is a freshly dug grave at Lussac's feet as he falls in a hail of bullets.