The fact was, Dietrich was now in her mid-40s, a typically lethal age for the careers of female stars, and had been off the screen long enough to be considered passé by studios now banking on younger sex symbols like Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. In France, the country's greatest male star of the pre-war era and a decorated war hero himself, Jean Gabin, was facing a similar situation. Three years younger than Dietrich, he had made his last great French movie years earlier, Le Jour se Lève (1939), before leaving for America. His Hollywood career, consisting of only two films, never really took off.
So the two stars were eager to find a worthy vehicle, an ambition fueled by the fact that they had been on-and-off lovers for several years and now, reunited in peacetime, wanted to work together.
Their chance came thanks to Marcel Carné, the noted French director of Children of Paradise (1945) and two of Gabin's best films, Le Jour se Lève and Le Quai des brumes (1938). Along with his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Carné was set to make an allegorical urban drama, Les portes de la nuit (1946), a darkly romantic tale of a Paris disillusioned and broken by the war. He wanted Gabin and Dietrich for the lead roles of doomed lovers.
Carné soon found to his dismay that Dietrich was not as ready to throw off the shackles of glamour as she had professed. According to the director, she stipulated full script approval in her contract and began making a number of demands for changes that would have transformed the melancholy heroine into someone far more recognizable as Marlene, the image she devoted herself to preserving all her life. "Deeply hurt at seeing her talent misunderstood," said Carné, with more than a touch of irony, she refused to do the project. (Some sources also claim Gabin was fired because of "his conduct," without much elucidation.)
Very quickly they were taken up by producer Marc Le Pelletier for Martin Roumagnac, an adaptation of a novel by Pierre-René Wolf. Dietrich was cast as a high-class call girl who begins a passionate affair with working-class building contractor Gabin. His overwhelming jealousy, stoked by learning of her profession, drives him to murder her and leads to his own violent end.
Gabin's jealous nature and his desire for something more permanent and stable with the notoriously free-wheeling and unconventional Dietrich began to drive a wedge between the two in real life as well. Making the rounds of Parisian nightlife, they were often seen quarreling bitterly. It didn't help matters that they soon realized they were involved in a stinker, an assessment that proved accurate at the French box office upon the picture's release. It was to be their only on-screen partnership. Their relationship held on for a couple of more years and ended completely when Gabin married someone else. For the rest of her life, Dietrich would describe him as her greatest love.
The film was eventually released in the U.S. in 1948 and fared even more miserably here. Shocked by the frankness with which the French depicted prostitution, American censors insisted she be referred to as a "merry widow" in subtitles, and so much was cut from the original that stateside audiences were thoroughly confused by what was left of the plot. Released as The Room Upstairs, it was deemed "a curiously uninspired treatment of a crude and conventional theme" by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times and died a quick death.
Beyond its two stars, the chief interest here is influential cinematographer Roger Hubert, known for his work with Carné (Les Visiteurs du Soir, 1942; Children of Paradise), Abel Gance (Napoléon Bonaparte, 1935, a re-edited and sound-enhanced version of Gance's 1927 silent masterpiece, on which Hubert served as a camera operator), and Jacques Feyder.
Fans of French cinema may also recognize leading man and character actor Daniel Gélin in one of his first screen roles. Over the course of his long career, Gélin worked with a number of noted directors, including Max Ophuls (La Ronde, 1950; Le Plaisir, 1952), Louis Malle (Murmur of the Heart, 1971), Alfred Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956) and Jean Cocteau (Testament of Orpheus, 1960). He was the father of the late Maria Schneider, who starred opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Jack Nicholson in The Passenger (1975).
As for the romantic duo, their love affair may not have outlasted this debacle but their careers managed to bounce back separately. Dietrich made a triumphant return to form with Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948). She made only a dozen more films before her retirement in 1978, all of them testaments to the enduring Dietrich mystique, after which she retreated to her apartment in Paris, refusing to be seen again. Gabin struggled through a few more box office disappointments but eventually made his way back to the top, working steadily over the next 30 years right up to his death in 1976.
Director: Georges Lacombe
Screenplay: Pierre Véry, Georges Lacombe, based on the novel by Pierre-René Wolf
Production Management: Marc Le Pelletier
Cinematography: Roger Hubert Editing: Germaine Artus
Art Direction: Georges Wakhévitch
Music: Marcel Mirouze
Cast: Marlene Dietrich (Blanche Ferrand), Jean Gabin (Martin Roumagnac), Jean d'Yd (Blanche's uncle), Daniel Gélin (Young man in love with Blanche), Jean Darcante (defense lawyer)
By Rob Nixon
