Croupier

Did Hollywood know just what it had in Marcel Dalio? He fled the Nazi occu­pa­tion of France not ter­ribly long after giv­ing one of the greatest per­form­ances in film his­tory, as the Marquis de Chesnaye in Renoir’s La régle du jeu…and once in the city of nets, largely played a series of croupi­ers and con­ci­erges and the like. (Okay, he got to play Clemenceau in that ulti­mate white ele­phant movie Wilson.)

Of course he made a par­tic­u­larly spec­tac­u­lar croupi­er. And man­aged to play dif­fer­ent types of croupi­ers, even. In Casablanca, play­ing Emil, he was tent­at­ive, har­ried, eas­ily flustered, always try­ing to please his cyn­ic­al but strangely bene­fi­cent mas­ter Rick Blaine. (You’d nev­er guess that his real-life self was at the time mar­ried to the rav­ish­ing Madeleine Lebeau, who played Yvonne, the gor­geous would-be con­quest of Captain Renault. Who is of course saved from Renault’s clutches via a Blaine-directed manip­u­la­tion of the roul­ette wheel. [UPDATE: As com­menter Vanwall points out, I’ve got my babes mixed up, and Yvonne is in fact the “where were you last night?” castoff of Rick him­self. The point stands, kind of, but I regret the error. Serves me right for cre­at­ing a post at such an ungodly hour.]) And in von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, made a little before Casablanca, he is ice-cold, imper­i­ous, as Marcel, “mas­ter of the spin­ning wheel,” one of the many agents of the down­fall of poor little rich girl Poppy Charteris (the incred­ible Gene Tierney). Gesture, an inef­fable  exem­plar of “sad­ist­ic cinema,” is giv­en a longer look today at The Auteurs’; a recent video ver­sion of it is the sub­ject of today’s Foreign Region DVD Report.