The Irishman, Jean Gabin and Louis-Ferdinand Céline

In discussing the making of his elegiac masterpiece The Irishman, Martin Scorsese tells Spike Lee of the films he screened for Robert De Niro to prepare the actor for his role of Frank Sheehan, the eponymous mob hitman.

The films Scorsese mentions are French crime and gangster films of the 1950s and 1960s and are Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos and Le deuxième souffle (both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo); Jules Dassin’s Riffifi (starring Jean Savais); and Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi.

Regarding Touchez pas au grisbi, Scorsese says: 

‘I showed a film called Touchez pas au grisbi, which means “Don’t touch the loot”, which is a very famous early ’50s French gangster film with Jean Gabin. When I was shooting [Robert De Niro] in Casino I felt he was taking on the stature of a late-to-middle-age Gabin. He had a lot of power to him but he had a serenity to him too and a coolness. Bob I felt was getting that way in Casino. Grisbi has a similar [theme] in the sense that they are older gangsters in Paris and they are getting involved in stuff they don’t want to get involved with. It’s really the tone, but I like the Gabin feeling of his deportment, how he presented himself.’

This comparison between Gabin and De Niro is a wonderful insight from Scorsese that changes the way we look at Frank Sheehan and De Niro’s depiction of him. 

Gabin is, of course, the greatest actor of French cinema. His reputation was established in films of the 1930s poetic realism movement – Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths (based on the Maxim Gorky play); La Grande Illusion; and La Bete Humaine; Julien Duvivier’s Pépe le Moko; and Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Léve – before the Nazi occupation of France forced him into Hollywood exile.

Gabin made two films in Hollywood.

In Moontide (1942), he plays Bobo, a dock worker prone to drunken violence who wanders the seedy ports of California taking employment when and where he can. One night, he saves a woman (Ida Lupino) from drowning herself. At first, he is non-plussed by his heroism, but then falls in love with the would-be suicide. Bobo begins to doubt his aimless drifting and contemplates the virtues of a domestic life. Will Bobo’s buddy, who has shared his gypsy life and taken advantage of Bobo’s self-loathing and belief that he needs a buffer to prevent his brutal temper from getting him into trouble, allow Bobo to escape his influence and make a better life for himself?

Moontide bridges French poetic realism with American film noir, though this is not a drama of the city but of the sea, set amid the shacks, barges and dives of San Pablo bay. But the film is a failure. It lacks tension, is grim to the point of depressing – more grim noir than film noir – and suffers from some incredulous plotting. It would have been interesting to see what Fritz Lang – who left the film early on because of a conflict with Gabin over the Frenchman’s affair with Marlene Dietrich, who Lang was also involved with – would have done with the material.

Gabin’s second Hollywood film, The Imposter (1944), is more successful. Directed by fellow-exile Julien Duvivier, Gabin gives an intense and restrained performance as a convicted murderer (Clement) about to be guillotined for his crime. A priest accompanies Clement to his execution imploring the sneering prisoner to accept God and open the way for his salvation only for bombs to fall from the sky like thunderbolts from Zeus as the Nazis invade France. The bombs destroy the prison, massacre the executioners and God’s apologist and the criminal escapes.

A liberated Clement stumbles across a ragtag of French soldiers retreating south from the invading German army. The truck they are travelling in is strafed by German planes. Again, Clement is unscathed by the attack and takes the opportunity to rob one of the killed soldiers of his uniform and identity papers. As Lt Maurice LaFarge, Clement is able to escape France and find obscurity among the Free French Forces in French Equatorial Africa. Gradually, Clement’s cynicism and dedication to self-preservation at all costs is replaced by a sense of belonging and loyalty to the men who have been entrusted to his command, men who come to adore their leader’s stoicism and fearlessness in the face of adversity. Will Clement be allowed to continue with his new identity as Lt LaFarge and appreciation of life or will it be revealed that he is an imposter, a fraud, a murderer masquerading as a hero?

Clement’s anarchic loathing for authority, for country, his tendency to individualism and self-reliance to the point of misanthropy, could come from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s classic anti-war, anti-flag novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

‘People, countries, and objects all end up as smells.’

‘I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.’

Céline and Journey to the End of the Night are mentioned by Scorsese to Lee as one of the novels that informed his view of The Irishman.

‘There’s a quote towards the end [of the novel] where the main character gets killed. He’s talking with his girlfriend. She says, “What happened to you?: He says, “What happened to me is a whole life has happened to me”, and she shoots him. It’s a tough book. It’s ugly. When he says that, it hit me, he’s right. A whole life. Something I can never explain to you. You had to live it with me. You had to be me. That’s what we were trying to go for in the film.’

* Gabin didn’t take to Hollywood and its rigid studio system. Like Clement, he decided to fight for his country and left to join the Free French Forces. He fought in North Africa and then was part of the French 2nd Armoured Division that liberated Paris after D-Day.

Céline, the artist; Céline, the anti-semite

‘As long as we’re young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you've squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together.’ (Journey to the End of the Night).

‘Courage doesn't consist in forgiveness, we always forgive too much.’ (Journey to the End of the Night).

Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s status as one of the most important writers of the 20th century has always been tainted by his rabid anti-semitism and collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France.

Haunted by his experiences of the Great War – during which he was wounded, received the Médaille militaire for bravery and was discharged in September 1915 with the rank of sergeant – and his belief that France and Germany should never go to war again, Céline imagined a Franco-German union to dominate Europe and insisted it was Jews and communists – who, in Céline’s mind, were interchangeable – standing in the way of this necessary outcome.

Echoing tropes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Céline, having come to prominence with his novels Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Instalment Plan, wrote, from 1937 to 1941, a series of pamphlets – Trifles for a Massacre, School for Corpses and A Fine Mess – that railed against ‘International Jewry’ and claimed it was dragging France into war with Hitler, a ‘Jewish war’ that would end with millions of lives lost and the death of France and Europe, which would be overwhelmed by ‘Bolshevism, blacks and Asiatics’. Before it was too late, Céline pleaded, Jews should be ‘grabbed by their pursestrings and strangled with them’.

These scandalous views informed Céline’s appeasement, then hope that Germany would win the war and transparent collaboration with the Nazi occupiers of France, though his virulent anti-semitism often proved too much even for German officials, who regarded him either as ridiculous or insane.

Inevitably, as the conflict drew to a close with German defeat imminent, Céline fled France, with other ‘refugees’ (collaborators, Pétainists, informers) traversing Hitler’s Germany in its death throes, eventually making it to Copenhagen, still under Nazi occupation. When Europe was liberated, Céline found himself the target of a retributive French government, which put in a request with the Danes for Céline’s extradition on treason charges.

Céline was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months while the extradition request was dealt with. Eventually, the Danish courts declined to send Céline back to France and he was released in June 1947. Céline remained in Denmark for the next four years as prosecutors in France continued to gather evidence to bring him to trial for his wartime activities.

Céline and his sympathisers tried to justify his anti-semitism by arguing it was simply the same grotesque hyperbole found in his novels; and that when he spoke of Jews he didn’t really mean Jews but Jews as a metaphor for all those whose avaricious, war-mongering narcissism had driven Europe towards the Apocalypse. Thus, Hitler and the Pope were as much Jews as the industrialist, the banker and journalist.

Others were less generous in their understanding, asserting it wasn’t possible to separate the Spenglerian writer railing against Europe’s decline and France’s decadence with the violent anti-semitic pamphleteer. One fed into the other.

The communist press maintained an unrelenting campaign for harsh punishment. ‘Let Céline come back!’ Le Droit de vivre declared. ‘We’re waiting for him at the station. And we promise him a fine welcome!’

However, the prevailing view was that the ailing, ageing, possibly mad Céline cut a pathetic figure, no longer worthy of arousing feelings of anger or forgiveness.

Andre Breton wrote: ‘I became nauseated by Céline pretty early on: I didn’t need to read further than the first third of Journey to the End of the Night, where I came to grief against some flattering characterisation of a colonial infantry NCO. It seemed to be an outline of some sordid train of thought. As the war approached, I was shown other texts by him that justified my predispositions. I loathe the sensationalist literature that inevitably and quickly descends into slander and calumny, appealing to all that is base in the world.’

While Albert Camus said: ‘Political injustice disgusts me. That is why I believe the trial should be stopped and Céline left in peace. But allow me to add that anti-Semitism and particularly the anti-Semitism of the 1940s, disgusts me every bit as much. That is why I believe that, when Céline gets what he wants, we should stop being bothered with his “case”’

A trial in absentia in February 1951 found Céline guilty on lesser charges of harming national defence (rather than treason), and he was sentenced to a year in prison, a fine of 50,000 francs and denounced as a national disgrace, all of which were superseded by an amnesty that allowed for Céline’s return to France in July 1951.

Céline spent the remaining 10 years of his life trying to manage the contempt and opprobrium that became attached to him, rescue his reputation as a writer of the first order and explain how this could be reconciled with his horrific descent into anti-semitic pathology.