Unforgettable Meeting: Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot in ‘In Case of Misfortune’

2021-08-09 07:00:00

“She’s the most beautiful chick I’ve ever seen. » Jean Gabin’s diagnosis, following a hard day’s work, is final. On December 7, 1957, the actor found himself face to face with his partner for the first time, at the Joinville studios, for the filming ofIn chave bad luck.

The meeting is meticulously scripted by the filmmaker Claude Autant-Lara who places his camera behind the actor, so that the spectator feels the same emotion as the actor. This will be the emblematic sequence of the film: Brigitte Bardot raises the skirt of her suit, reveals her suspenders and her stockings, before the camera films her buttocks in reverse, which she poses three-quarters on a desk. This time, Gabin can only imagine the forms “offered” to the viewer. But he is entitled to these words: “Might as well enjoy it before they put me in jail. »

Jean Gabin, tenor of the bar in the film, receives a young delinquent, played by Bardot, who, following having held up an old jeweler with a child’s gun, tries to convince the lawyer to plead his case. The scene of their meeting remains unforgettable, as much for the provocative Bardot as for the Gabin scrutinizing her, seized, at 53, by desire, and forever a prisoner of it. “It was very erotic, very insolent, said in total silence, wrote Bardot in his Memoirs. I had to pull up my skirt in front of Gabin, it wasn’t done at that time. To within a millimeter, it was very delicate. »

virtue leagues

This meeting almost did not take place. As soon as he signed his contract, in February 1957, to play in In case of misfortune, Gabin no longer wants to share the poster with an actress too far from his standing. And then, at his ease in films of virile men, he tastes little, to put it mildly, the sulfurous reputation of BB to the point of reducing it to “a thing that walks around naked”. He finally knows that the first film where she plays the main role, And God created the woman, was a flop when it was released in France the previous year. So the star with thick, white hair no longer intends to keep his commitment, to the point of being dragged onto the set by an usher.

But there you have it, the actress he sees ten months later in this scene fromIn case of misfortune is no longer what he imagined. Faced with the erotic choreography of the actress, Gabin, a flash in her blue eyes, cowardly, without taking her lips off: “I like tall women. You are great, so I love you. » The formula is multiple reading. The one that must be kept today is symbolic. Gabin is no longer addressing a 24-year-old starlet but a phenomenon. Better still, he witnesses the emergence of a new world. Because there was, in the meantime, a Bardot explosion, an earthquake even, the tremors of which are felt throughout the world. This scene ofIn case of misfortune constitutes a concentrate.

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