In 1933, Marcel Carné (Les Enfants du Paradis) wrote an essay entitled, ‘When will the Cinema descend into the Street?’ Like François Truffaut's later call for a departure from ‘cinéma du papa’, this was a bold manifesto that urged film-makers to abandon escapism and concentrate on the problems of everyday life and the humanity of the working classes. Yet it took Carné a further five years to respond to his own challenge with Le Quai des Brumes.
Scripted by Jacques Prévert and set in a rundown quarter of Le Havre (which was designed with typically tangible authenticity by Alexandre Trauner), this simmering melodrama reinforced the myth of Jean Gabin as the personification of the national mood in the years between the collapse of the Popular Front government and the inevitable outbreak of WWII.
Indeed, as the fugitive whose destiny is decided by a chance meeting with Michèle Morgan and her sleazy guardian, Michel Simon, Gabin seemed so powerless to avoid kismet that a Vichy spokesman later blamed the picture for imbuing France with the defeatism that facilitated the Nazi conquest.
Carné countered that the barometer shouldn't be blamed for the storm it predicts. Yet the same sense of predestined doom informed Le Jour se Lève, which was banned within months of its release by authorities fearful of the impact its poetic pessimism would have on the populace.
The careworn Gabin again excels, as the sandblaster who barricades himself against the police and reflects on the cruel vagaries that brought him into contact with the naive Jacqueline Laurent, the cynical Arletty and the hissable Jules Berry.
But the sense of untrammelled evil that pervades the proceedings was generated as much by Trauner's evocative sets, Curt Courant's claustrophobic cinematography and Maurice Jaubert's ominous score as by the existential angst of Prévert's literate screenplay, whose melodramatic potential was tempered into a work of great psychological and artistic significance by Carné's mastery of his medium.
Icon of French fatalism, Jean Gabin, plays Francois, who sits locked in his room, a gun in his hand, having just committed the murder of the man who has thwarted his love to a florist. As he contemplates his fate, he reflects on how events have conspired to bring his life to this conclusion - starting with falling in love with a young woman whose attentions are soon distracted by the arrival of Machiavellian dog trainer Valentin.
