Background
Jean Grémillon was born on 3 October 1901 in Bayeux, Basse-Normandie, France.
Jean Grémillon was born on 3 October 1901 in Bayeux, Basse-Normandie, France.
Grémillon was trained as a musician; his first contact with cinema was as a violin accompanist to silent films. He made many industrial documentaries and began directing features in 1926. Because of scant success, he was forced to look for assignments in Germany and Spain: Centinella! Alerta! had Bunuel as its executive producer. Grémillon often composed the music for his own films. Only with war did he return to France and produce fully personal films, especially Lumière d'Eté, a Jacques Prévert allegory about a group of failures living on the edge of the abyss, mordant and sad.
Grémillon's essential bleakness was maintained in Pattes Blanches, an Anouilh script about sexual rivalry, and in his documentary on the D-Day landings, which concentrates on the ravages left in the Normandy countryside—the director’s own homeland. After the war, Grémillon was president of the Cinémathèque until his death, and largely preoccupied with documentaries. Thus, he made few features with real freedom. He may be a subject for réévaluation. Certainly his films are intensely felt, the work of a man sensitive to music, painterly composition, and the subtleties of Normandy and Brittany.
Gueule d’Amour leaves one in no doubt— Grémillon was a remarkable director. It has Gabin as a soldier with a reputation for having his way with women . . . until he meets a wealthy Parisian (played by Mireille Balin). This is a cinema of inner, emotional realism, with subtle, secretive performances and an eye that invests objects and places with poetic meaning. The film is unerringly modern and it makes one want to see anything by Grémillon.