Goodbye Beautiful Days Review: Young Jean Gabin gets his heart broken

If you want to see a very young, surprisingly naive Jean Gabin get totally played by a gorgeous jewel thief, yes, you should watch this. It is perfect for anyone who loves dusty 1930s European melodrama with legendary actors before they became legends. If you hate scratchy audio and plots that rely on men being incredibly gullible, you will probably hate it.

So, Olga (played by the magnetic Brigitte Helm) is this high-class thief who targets Pierre, a young engineer. Jean Gabin plays Pierre, and he is wearing these incredibly high-waisted trousers that make him look like he is being squeezed from the ribs down. 👖

It is wild seeing Gabin like this before he became the ultimate tough-guy icon of French cinema. Here, he is just... kind of a sweet dummy who believes everything she says.

Anyway, Olga steals his trust, but then she actually falls in love with him. She decides she wants to leave the crime life behind for good.

Classic trope, right? But Brigitte Helm plays it with this intense, wide-eyed desperation that makes you actually buy into it. She has this one scene where she just stares at a mirror like she hates her own face, and it is so dramatic.

But her old crime buddies are absolute idiots. Seriously, they mess up a simple situation so badly it feels like a scene from How Comedies Are Born rather than a sleek crime drama.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Goodbye Beautiful Days (1933) through its definitive frames.

They basically hand her over to the police through pure awkwardness. I actually laughed out loud when one of them tripped over a chair during a tense moment.

There is this one cop who has a mustache so big it looks like it is trying to escape his face. I honestly could not stop looking at it during his entire scene.

The ending is just incredibly sad. Pierre just packs up and heads back to Paris, looking completely defeated and lonely.

It does not have the grand, epic tragedy of something like The Tower of Silence, but it still stings. You can feel how much he wanted to believe her.

I did notice the music cuts out really awkwardly in a few scenes. Like, someone just lifted the needle off the record mid-sentence because they ran out of track.

But the chemistry between Helm and Gabin keeps the whole thing afloat, even when the plot gets a bit silly. It is a messy, beautiful little relic of early sound cinema.