Gérard Blain | Un Enfant dans la Foule (A Child in the Crowd) / 1976

men on the move

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gérard Blain and Michel Pérez (screenplay), Gérard Blain (director) Un Enfant dans la Foule (A Child in the Crowd) / 1976

 

Actor and director Gérard Blain (1930-2000) was often described as the French James Dean (1931-1955), who he slightly resembled and whose early film portrayals sometimes represented him as a kind of youthful rebel. But, in reality, they are quite the polar opposites.

    While Dean flashed across the screen in films released over two years—Rebel without a Cause, East of Eden, both in 1955, and Giant, released after his death in 1956—acting out both bisexual and pained heterosexual fantasies, Blain acted for many long years from 1944 to 2001, often portraying borderline if not actual homosexual/homosocial roles, particularly in his most noted films performed at the height of his acting career in 1958, Marcello in Mauro Bolognini’s Young Husbands, Serge in Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, and Charles in Cabrol’s Les Cousins. Moreover, Blain became a noted director of nine works, at least three of these, The Friends, A Child in the Crowd, and The Rebel, for which he also served as co-writer, loosely based on his young years of ages 13-17 involving homosexual experiences with older pedophilic men.

     Yet as an adult Blain was quite obviously heterosexual, marrying three times, and at moments appearing to be somewhat homophobic, while over the years Dean’s homosexual relations with the young actor Sal Mineo, and rumored sexual liaisons with Marlon Brando, Rogers Brackett, and even director Douglas Sirk have helped burnish his myth as a bisexual or even homosexual rebel.

     Dean was all hot, while Blain, despite his occasional rebel Truffautian mystique, at least in his filmmaking, appeared more like his later friend and idol Robert Bresson, to be objectively “cold,” even while portraying his central young male figures as tortured and eager-to-be-loved human beings.

      Dean’s myth seems to grow each year, while the memory of the great works performed and directed by Blain seems to have almost been forgotten. Yet, if forced to make unnecessary comparisons, any cinephile would have to admit that Blain was the greater talent.

    Consider just one of his features, A Child in the Crowd, one of the best French language films of the 1970s (which is saying something when you recall that François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Bertrand Blier, Louis Malle, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Tati, Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, Bresson, and Chabrol all made some of their best films in this decade).

     This film begins with an incident that is almost the inverse of several of Bresson’s scenes: whereas in works such as The Diary of a Country Priest, the young priest finds a moment of exhilarating joy on a motorbike just before he leaves the village to die of cancer, or in Mouchette where the young girl finds a truly lovely thrill in the Dodg’em cars before recognizing that her life is so dour that she commits suicide, Blain’s A Child in the Crowd begins with the young 9-year-old hero, Paul (played at this point by Jean François Cimino) being ferried by auto back to his Catholic boarding school on the outskirts of Paris by his father and mother, the boy consumed in uncontrollable tears.

     They coldly drop him off and he is escorted to his dorm bed among his sleeping fellow students. Given his melancholic response, we can only imagine that he is being bullied or has been forced into the bed of a pedophile priest. But, in fact, nothing like that at all occurs. Except for its rather militaristic marching of boys to and fro—a hint along with others in this film that the French themselves have many fascist tendencies—the boys basically seem happy, their religious ceremonies portrayed as joyful moments of belief. Indeed, one of Paul’s peers approaches him at recess to ask why he stands away and apart from the other boys, encouraging him to join in, Paul responding that he is simply too homesick.

     As we soon discover, however, the home to which he so desires to return is actually “sick,” his father (John Bertal) regularly leaving his mother home alone at nights, in another incident which Paul overhears, possibly even beating her, and soon after abandoning the family forever before their divorce; Paul’s mother (Annie Kovaks) is a cold woman who clearly prefers Paul’s sister Micheline (Cécile Cousseau) and inexplicably feels little emotion for her son. The divorce only makes his homelife worse, as the cold-hearted mother now devotes almost all her time to sewing so that she might bring in a small income. In short, the home for which our young hero longs for is one of his imagination. It appears he might be far better off in a protective institution.

    However, with the German occupation, Paul, now 13 and 14 (played by César Chauveau) seems far happier roaming the streets, picking up beers for local Nazi soldiers and hanging out with a slightly older friend who is a reader of books—loaning Paul a copy of Around the World in 80 Days—and a stamp collector, Paul stealing an older man’s stamp book to gift his friend a new one, an act that gets him into even further trouble and ultimately forces his mother to temporarily kick him out of her house. Later, when Paul has been expelled from school, his older friend is not even permitted to see Paul again.

     By the time the Americans arrive to liberate the city, Paul has virtually left his schooling behind as he worked with the French underground by loading rifle cartridges with bullets. With liberation near, however, he is sent back home for his own protection, and it is on the dark streets where the Nazis attempt a final round up a murder of local partisans that he experiences the true terrors of war.

    Once liberation occurs, Paul observes perhaps one of the most memorable and horrific images of the film, a young naked female prostitute with shaved head and a Nazi swastika drawn across her breast, as a large gang of French housewives and their husbands surround her, taunting and mocking her as their push her forward down the street before finally abandoning her against a wall.

   As the girl falls the ground crying as endlessly as Paul had as the child in the first scene of this movie, he cautiously moves toward her, eventually placing his comforting hand on her shoulder; he truly understands the horror of being a lonely and isolated outsider in his own land.

   As the liberators make their presence known, Paul innocently begins to seek out father figures in some of the American boys who reward him cigarettes, soap, candy, and chewing gum for joining them in their beds. Soon after one of his US friends sadly declares he must leave him to fight in Germany, he meets another young man on the subway who takes a personal interest in him beginning with a visit to a movie.

  Later a third older married man explains that he is moving back to his wife in Lyon before admitting that he simply feels it is better to break off their pedophilic relationship while he still can.

  Blain shows none of the boy’s sexual encounters, but clearly suggests the elder’s nefarious activities through their gifts and their appearance in dark abandoned back streets with the boy or in open rooms where they are dressed in bathrobes. At one point, one of the boy’s pick-up substitute fathers even pawns him off on an older woman who insists instead of soda he try some Chartreuse Green.

  Throughout all of these encounters, nonetheless, Paul seems to thrive, wanly smiling, enjoying himself by imagining that these relationships represent real love, whereas when he returns home he is greeted with an open sense of uncaring, his mother most commonly asking him not to make any noise upon his exits and returns.

    But when the older business man breaks up with him and his mother dismisses him once again, he turns to a priest who has been attempting to lure him back to school. Paul visits the priest, who shows, once again, the schoolboys at joyful play, suggesting that he too could find pleasure in returning to the fold.

    Paul promises he will consider the offer, but as we walks out of the school yard and returns to the street to light up a cigarette, he is met by yet another old man (played by Blain himself) who walking in the other direction, momentarily stops, taking up the boy’s cigarette to light his own fag, before Paul walks on down the street alone. He—the future Paul—is just another man on the move.

    We finally perceive that Paul, although at this point perhaps only 14 or 15, is no longer a boy but a young man of experience. There is no longer any place in his heart for childish joys, his family and the war itself having ripped them from him at such an early age.

    He walks on down the street, turns a corner and disappears from sight. He has determined, so he earlier reports, to become an actor; there may be a role for him in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis, a part, uncredited, that Blain actually did play in that great French classic film.

    Unlike Bresson’s unloved priest and young girl, Paul is a survivor. He does not suffer death through a miserable disease or commit suicide, but comes alive simply by finding love wherever he imagines it might be waiting for him. He is kin to Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel after all, not Bresson’s sad saints.  

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).