Lilac + They Were Five

EARLY GABIN  The young Jean Gabin takes center stage in Sunday’s return to the Big Roxie.

Lilac / Coeur de lilas

12:30 PM “Street film,” the policier, and the “woman in distress” all coalesce in LILAC, reminding us just what a dynamic filmmaker the young, pre-Hollywood Anatole Litvak really was. Gabin makes his presence known as an “apache” (the French term for the borderline criminal roughnecks looking for loot and love in the Parisian demimonde), but the true tension in the story is between Lilac (the charming but doomed Marcelle Romée, who would commit suicide in real life just a few months after the film’s premiere) and the police detective (Andre Luguet) who eyes her for the murder of a shady industrialist but who finds his investigation romantically compromised… (1932, dir. Anatole Litvak, 90m)

There Were Five / La belle équipe

2:15 PM Fast forward four years and we have Jean Gabin in the early arc of what quickly became a legendary career, working again with Julien Duvivier (seven collaborations in all between 1935-1956) in an ensemble film about the incompatibilities of friendship and entrepreneurial endeavor. THEY WERE FIVE shows how dreams get corroded by what happens in life: the shimmering guingette that a pentagon of pals (Gabin foremost among them) wish to make into their stake in the world of France’s shimmering but short-lived Popular Front, the “better society” that would all too soon evaporate. Two endings were shot for the film—we show you the more prophetic (and more noir) downbeat version… (1936, dir. Julien Duvivier, 100m)