Jean Gabin smolders as a capricious and self-serving pussyhound in Lady Killer (1937), Jean Gremillon’s swift and steamy pre-war melodrama. His road to romantic ruin is every woman’s worst vacation nightmare: after a brief fling and tender parting, there he is, months later, bag in hand and awaiting entry to your lavish Parisian penthouse. Pity Madeleine, the glamorous and mercenary sugarbaby of a stout businessman, torn between lusty French officer Lucien “Guele d’amour” Bourrache and her codependent, coattail-riding mother.
Lucien is content to spend his days chasing skirts and stirring up trouble, until fate casts him out of paradise—and, it so happens, out of his league. We’re a long way from the lovers’ meet cute on the Riviera: the titular “Mouth of Love” arrives in le Capital to a rude awakening for this discount Don Juan. Besotted by Mireille Balin’s kept woman (and who wouldn’t be!) Lucien trades the gold braid and glinting brass of his officer’s uniform for the humble workwear of a lumpenprole.
No longer the big fish in a small pond of fawning provincials, Lucien attempts to win over his high-class companion, but is met with cold-hearted scorn. Stripped of his state-issued formalwear and sole source of pride, the once-great lady-killer (a rich double-entendre, to be sure) is reduced to that most pathetic of creatures: a love-sick everyman, beholden to the whims of an unreachable ice queen. Driven by jealousy, thoroughly emasculated, the fire of Lucien’s ardor turns tack from a burning passion to a towering inferno of violence, fed by the quick-burning tinder of man’s humiliation.
Lady Killer screens through August 10 at Metrograph in a new digital restoration as part of the series “Jean Grémillon x2.”
