“Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” - Jean Renoir (1936)

Jean Renoir’s great films of the late 1930s have such a rich social complexity to them that they are sometimes summed up as reflecting his overall “humanism” – although I’m not sure that term does full justice to what Renoir accomplished. Certainly his films encompass multiple layers of fraternal camaraderie, social expectations, and romantic love that involve a number of interacting characters; and these films often have a depth that goes beyond the conventional cinema fare. In fact the first time one sees one of these films, it is easy to miss just how adroit Renoir’s cinematic expression was in these works. Cinematically, Renoir is able to convey multiple subjective perspectives, sometimes all in the same frame of an extended moving-camera shot.  Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), was an early oeuvre in this series, and it also happens to be one of Renoir’s more controversial offerings.

In some ways Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was Renoir’s most overtly political film.  Renoir’s generally leftist sympathies are in clear view in this work, which was made during the ascendancy of France’s Popular Front, a coalition of leftist political groups, including the Communist Party, that won the 1936 general election.  Renoir, himself, was affiliated with the Popular Front, and in that same year he also made a documentary film, La Vie Est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us) that was funded by the Communist Party.  But what makes Le Crime de Monsieur Lange particularly controversial is not so much its leftist sympathies, but its apparent justification of a murder (“le crime”) that was presumably done for social well-being.  (This may evoke some thoughts in your mind concerning the American government’s drone-empowered assassinations of foreign villains, but I will leave that topic aside here.)

The story of the film, as you would expect with Renoir, is more than just a political narrative, and it includes several romantic relationships. It is framed as a story told in flashback: an account of the circumstances that led up to the murder.  One can think of the plot as comprising five main sections, but the three inner sections make up the bulk of the film.

1.  Framing the Story (6 minutes)
A car drops off a man and a woman (we later learn their names -- Amèdée Lange and Valentine Cardès) to a hotel near the French frontier, and they check in for the night.  Immediately the hotel owner’s son recognizes the male guest as a wanted criminal, and suggests to the other hotel workers and patrons in the lobby they turn him in to the police.  During the ensuing discussion, the female guest comes out to the lobby and says that she will tell their story to all of them and that they can then judge what action they may want to take.

2.  Batala’s Publishing House (37 minutes)

The first section of the film presents the social situation at a local building courtyard that includes a small publishing run by Paul Batala, a laundry run by Valentine, and a rooming house managed by a concierge (Marcel Levesque) and his wife. The principal characters introduced here are

• Batala (Jules Berry) runs the publishing house, which is trying to get out its first issue of a pulp detective magazine. It is soon evident that Batala is a dishonest and unreliable manipulator, swindler, and womanizer.
• Lange (René Lefèvre) works for the publishing house.  He dreams of being a successful writer, and his nights are spent writing stories about his fictional creation, “Arizona Jim”.
• Edith (Sylvia Bataille) works for the publishing house and is Batala’s (current) woman.
• Valentine (Florelle) runs the laundry in the same courtyard buildling.
• Estelle (Nadia Sibirskaïa) is a pretty young woman working at the laundry.
• Charles (Maurice Baquet), the son of the concierge, is a bicycle delivery man and in love with Estelle.

As is typical with Renoir, the romantic involvements are many.  Batala had a past relationship with Valentine, is currently involved with Edith, and eventually forces himself on Estelle and impregnates her.  Edith loves Batala and will do whatever he says.  Lange is interested in Edith and Estelle, and later in Valentine.  Valentine is interested in Lange.  Estelle loves Charles, but shies away from a physical relationship.  Depicting the evolution of these relationships occupies the bulk of this part of the film. 

This section closes when the hopelessly in debt swindler, Batala, learns that his creditors are taking legal action against him that may lead to his imprisonment.  So Batala heads out of town on the train.

3.  The Worker’s Cooperative (20 minutes)
News reports indicate that Batala has been killed in a train crash, and the company’s creditors swarm into the publishing house demanding payment. The company staff propose that a worker’s collective be formed to run the business, and the chief creditor, M. Meunier’s son, readily accepts the idea. Soon the rejuvenated company is flourishing by publishing Lange’s “Arizona Jim” comics, which become huge bestsellers at all the newsstands.  The “team spirit” of the collective leads to social harmony and effective, cooperative work. 

Everyone is happy now.  Lange and Valentine have become lovers, and so, too, are Charles and Estelle.  Arizona Jim is such a success that the collective gets a film contract, and they decide to throw a party to celebrate.



4.  Batala Returns (14 minutes)
As the party begins in a dining room in the courtyard, Lange goes upstairs and discovers the presumed-dead Batala dressed as a priest and rummaging around in the company office. To Lange’s horror, Batala announces that he has returned to take what is his.  He says he owns all the rights to the company, and he intends to take over again and dissolve the worker cooperative. This is the corrupt 1% restoring its privileged ownership over the 99%, and Lange sees the idealistic dreams of the collective dissolving before his very eyes.  After Batala goes out into the courtyard and starts coming on to Valentine, Lange  rushes out and shoots Batala with a gun.  M. Meunier’s son offers to whisk Valentine and Lange away from the murder scene and take them to the border in his car.

5.  Closing the Frame (2 minutes)

We return to the present, with Valentine now having concluded her story to the hotel staff and awaiting their verdict: will they turn them in or let them go?  The closing shots reveal what that decision is, with Valentine and Lange making their way on foot along a windswept beach and across the border to safety and an unknown future.

The most evidently controversial issue with Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is whether it endorses committing murder for the common good.  But in fact there are several interesting aspects of the film worth considering, both with respect to the cinematic elements and to the larger themes presented. With respect to the cinematography, Renoir’s emerging virtues are on display. This includes shooting in depth, featuring multiple, active personages coming in and out of frame within a single shot.  In this respect there are several moving camera shots that have drawn considerable attention from critics, most notably during the murder sequence.  During that approximately three-minute scene, there are several closely joined shots that make the entire sequence seem almost like a single shot.  Film scholars have been particularly interested in the shot of the actual shooting, which includes a 270-degree reverse pan shot  [1,2].  In that shot, the camera has Lange initially in frame; and then as Lange moves away to the right, it pans to the left, in the opposite direction of Lange’s movement.  This pan shot sweeps quickly around the empty courtyard, finally winding up on Lange again, who is now in front of Batala.  Why did Renoir choose such a bizarre camera movement at this critical movement?  Some critics have suggested that Renoir’s pan was intended to incorporate the social perspective of the collective (the sounds of the celebratory party can be heard on the soundtrack throughout this shot) so as to make the murder an act of “the people” and not just that of an individual [1,2].  I rather doubt this interpretation.  Renoir’s pan here is quite rapid (perhaps too rapid) and not the sort of deliberative and circumspective movement that would incorporate all that it surveys into its overall perspective.  It is true that the shot does distance the viewer from Lange at this decisive moment, thereby building up dramatic tension, but whether the shot truly incorporates a socially communal perspective is doubtful.

Another interesting cinematic take with respect to this film is to compare its overall tone with Marcel Carne’s Le Jour se Léve (1939):

• Both films were scripted principally by Jacques Prevert. 
• Both films are told in flashback about a murder that has just been committed.
• In both films, the murdered man is an unprincipled and almost satanic shapeshifter stylishly played by Jules Berry.  The seemingly only way to thwart this treacherous threat is to kill him off.

Despite these similarities, the two films seem quite distinct to me.  Le Jour se Léve, the superior film, is a moody, existentialistic story about love. The viewer gets inside the head of the later film’s protagonist, François, and empathizes with his concerns and anxieties.  With respect to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, however, the perspective is more socially inclusive, and although the viewer sees the Lange character sympathetically, the view is primarily from the outside.  Thus  Le Jour se Léve is more subjectively romantic and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is more objectively political. Given the fact that Prevert scripted both films, we can assume that this distinction between the films largely reflects the differences between Carne’s and Renoir’s cinematic visions and styles of visual storytelling.

In fact this is what makes Renoir so interesting.  His cinematic storytelling style often incorporates multiple perspectives and is consequently both romantic and political at the same time.  But these two perspectives are not just stuck together in an ad hoc fashion without coherence; instead, these two angles seem to fit together into a larger human landscape.  Most critics and film scholars have focused on the political side of things, but the romantic side of this film is at least as important.  Thus there are viewers (in fact, sometimes even a single viewer on different occasions) who have liked this film for quite different reasons.

Consider the difference between the men and the women in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.  The three principal women, Valentine, Sylvia, and Edith, are all totally supportive and loving.  They are selfless, committed, and loyal to the individual men that they love, even when they, themselves, are ignored or abused.   The men, however, are quite the opposite.  Batala is good-tempered, but is also a selfish opportunist and willing to exploit anyone else in order to promote his own comfort.  The courtyard house concierge seems foolishly harmless, but he consistently espouses racist views and dismisses Asians (whom he had earlier encountered in the French “Tonkin Campaign”), Indians, and Blacks as stupid and lazy.  Charles is tolerably naive but totally focused on his own welfare.  Lange wants to do the right thing, but lives in a dream world of cowboys who right wrongs with a six-gun.  This kind of “solution” won’t work in the real world, and we know that Lange’s murder is a profoundly wrong way to deal with the complex, interleaved corruptions of modern existence.  In fact there is a disconcerting escapism that permeates the world around Lange.  Lange is troubled when the news of Batala’s death comes over the radio, but Valentine puckers up to him and says, “what about me; am I alive?”  And when the undesired child of Estelle and Batala is stillborn, there is only a momentary frown expressed by those around her.  In fact shortly thereafter Lange decides to incorporate that incident into one of his comic book stories, and he projects what will happen to one of his characters in his imagined story –  “Estelle, led astray by the sordid hooded fascist had a certain amount of luck: the baby died!”

So what are we to take away from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange?  Certainly we can’t endorse Lange’s murderous act, even though we know that this simple-minded man wanted to remove a miscreant whom nobody would miss.  Was the worker’s collective also such a simple-minded dream that it could not really work in the real world? According to Renoir’s optimistic presentation here, it could work, and this is where his inclusive humanistic vision comes into play.  The collectivist idea could work on a larger scale, but only if the socially collectivist structure is supported by the willing, compassionate engagement that underlies the spirit of this movie.  The political solution will not work without the romantic spirits, and this romantic spirit is most movingly expressed by the women in Renoir’s film, not the men.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Reader, Keith, “The Circular Ruins? Frontiers, Exile and the Nation in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” (2000), French Studies, vol LIV, No. 3, pp. 287-297.
2. O’Shaughnessy, Martin, “Breaking the Circle: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and the Contemporary Illegibility of the Radical Text” (2011), South Central Review, 28:3, pp. 26-44.

“Le Jour se Leve” - Marcel Carne (1939)

Some of our most deeply felt experiences cannot be put into words, and we must turn to other forms of expression. Le Jour se Léve (Daybreak, 1939), Marcel Carné’s greatest film, is a truly exquisite exploration of those feelings. During the late 1930s Carné worked with screenwriter Jacques Prévert, and their moody, romantic dramas were said to be examples of “poetic realism”, a film genre that also featured works by Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier. Certainly among the many great films of this genre, Le Jour se Léve and Renoir’s, La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939) were the high points. (Lamentably, remarks in Carné’s autobiography suggest that these two great visualizers of romantic humanism did not get along -- c’est la vie.) Ever since it's release and despite the deplorable condition of available prints since, Le Jour se Léve has been regarded as one of the greatest French films ever made.

It is particularly noteworthy that Carné’s greatest achievement in romantic expressionism was achieved without significant investment in set design. In addition, there are essentially only four characters of any consequence in the entire film, and each of these cast members plays his or her role to perfection. Like the preceding Carné-Prévert collaboration, Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), Le Jour se Léve starred Jean Gabin, who had not only become the leading French actor at this time, but was also almost the iconic figure of “poetic realism”. What Gabin was able to project in these films was something similar to what James Dean and the early Marlon Brando offered later in American films: a sensitivity and passion for feelings that was communicated outside the usual theatrical modes of verbal discourse. Somehow we viewers can empathise with Gabin, as we can with Dean, even when others around him in the story do not understand him and cannot share his feelings. We not only understand the Gabin character, we assert that he is perfectly normal, like us – we identify with him, even when, as in Le Jour se Léve, he is driven by his passions to commit murder.

Le Jour se Léve is about love, of course, but more than that, it is about the existential despair that is felt in connection with the usually hopeless quest to open oneself completely to another and achieve a kind of soulful union – the one, true love. The narrative, the sujet, is told as a series of three extended reverie flashbacks that represent the main character’s reflections concerning events that led up to the murder that he has committed. Overall, the plot comprises four sequences in “the present”, which are separated by three separate flashback reveries concerning earlier events.

1. Present. From the top of a high-rise apartment building, a shot rings out, and an exiting figure falls down the stairs and dies. A crowd gathers and police quickly ring the building. From inside the apartment, Francois, fires some warning gunshots to hold the police at bay.


2. Flashback #1. Francois in seen working at his job as a sandblaster in a foundry, a noisy, grimy industrial environment cut off from normal human interaction. A young, pretty girl, Francoise, walks by looking for directions, and despite the overwhelming noise of the factory, they engage in some polite small talk. The delight in discovering the similarity of their names and the fact that they were both raised in orphanages.

Three weeks later at Francoise’s apartment, the two are shown to be in love, particularly Francois, who wishes to progress their relationship further. He asks to stay the night, but Francoise demurely says that she has a prior engagement for the evening. Francois masks his jealously and leaves, but then he surreptitiously follows her when she soon goes out to a cabaret. There he discovers that she is enthralled by middle-aged entertainer, Valentin, who commands his trained dogs to perform tricks. Despite his utterly tasteless performance, Valentin is utterly confident on stage, and Francoise, sitting in the audience up front, enthusiastically appreciates every bit of it. Midway through the act, Valentin’s stage assistant, Clara, walks off the stage and over to the bar, where she meets and strikes up a casual, but flirtatious, conversation with Francois. At the end of his act, Valentin exits the cabaret with Francoise (still oblivious to the presence of Francois), but he returns a few moments later and berates Clara for walking out on his act. Francois, standing next to her, steps forward and tells Valentin to shove off.

3. Present. The besieged apartment room is now subject to a fusillade of police bullets, but Francois barricades the door and holds out.

4. Flashback #2. Clara’s apartment, where Francois is now the paramour of the mature and worldly woman. Though cohabiting, their relationship is casual, with no long-term commitments. Much to their annoyance, Valentin shows up and cajoles Francois into having a private talk about Francoise. In that talk Valentin claims that Francoise is his long-abandoned daughter and that he is worried about her welfare. Shocked by this revelation, Francois angrily swears that he loves Francoise, and that Valentin has no claim on her affairs.


The scene shifts to a flower shop attended to by Francoise, where she is visited by an ardent Francois. He is happy to learn from her that Valentin had lied and is not really her father. After Francois proposes marriage, the two lovers exchange amorous caresses. Francoise gives him a ceramic broach as a keepsake of their mutual, passionate love.

Francois then goes to Clara to break off their relationship. Clara, hiding her hurt, cooly comments how the venal Valentin trained his dogs by torturing them with a red-hot iron. And worse, she says that he has a collection of identical, cheap ceramic broaches, which he gives as souvenirs to each woman that he conquers. Clara shows Francois her own broach from Valentin, and he recognises that it is exactly like the one Francoise had given to him.

5. Present. Francois angrily throws the tainted broach out the window and then screams down to the crowd of onlookers. Francoise, in anguish among that crowd, faints and is taken to back Clara’s apartment.

6. Flashback #3. Valentin comes to Francois’s room and starts putting on another phony performance, showing off a gun he had intended to use on Francois. But instead he starts taunting Francois about how he had seduced Francoise. Enraged, Francois grabs the gun and shoots Valentin, bringing the action to the film’s starting point.


7. Present. At Clara’s apartment, Clara is trying to comfort the still delirious Francoise, but both women are in tears. Meanwhile Francois awaits his inevitable fate as the police close in with tear gas.

The performances of each of the four principal cast members is superb. Jean Gabin was never better than in this role of Francois. He is the perfect mixture of brooding toughness mixed with romantic sensitivity. Jules Berry, a distinguished character actor who had earlier played brilliantly in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), is perfect as the role-playing Valentin, who manipulates the civilized customs of our culture in order to grab what he can and avoid responsibility. This overt exploitation of culture is foreign and infuriating to the working-class Francois. Arletty, as Clara, is a sympathetic observer to the tragedy who is unable to prevent its fatal denouement. Jacqueline Laurent, who was eighteen at the time of the film shooting, is also just right as the guileless Francoise. Each of these players is able to express the crucial interpersonal overtones that make the film a special experience.

In Flashback #1, Francois is presented as someone with whom most men can identify: genial but reserved. He doesn’t put on a show for others, but wishes to retain an authentic bearing that is true to himself. By maintaining his balance, he retains his “cool”, and he avoids showing any jealous concerns that may temporarily upset him. His efforts to maintain his authenticity are sharply contrasted by Valentin, who is most self-evidently a phony in every way. In his looks, manners, and actions, Valentin is the essence of inauthenticity: a duplicitous worm who unashamedly slips from one slimy mendacious role to the next without batting an eye. Though he is internally infuriated that Francoise, the embodiment of innocence, is so easily fooled by Valentin’s cheap tricks, Francois tries not to show his feelings of jealousy to her.

In Flashback #2, which is the key sequence in the film, the romantic relationship between Francois and Francoise reaches its culmination. In it, they swear their true love, their authentic love. The amorous scene in the flower shop shows them building their own special world of tenderness and affection.


For Francois, his relationship with Clara was sensual, but it was not the true union of souls that he longs for. Francois and Clara have been too cool, too reserved, too adult, to let themselves go very deep into an interpersonal union -- although there are indications that Clara (in a subtly resonating performance by Arletty) is masking her feelings and is actually in love with Francois. We could say then that the affair between Clara and Francois, though it passes for a love affair in our society, is not an authentic union of souls. Similarly, whatever the relationship was between Francoise and Valentin, it, too, was undoubtedly inauthentic, even for the sincere Francoise – it was merely an inauthentic dabbling in romantic fantasy that had been conjured up by a lecherous shapeshifter.

In the end, Francois could not abide with the idea that Francoise had slept with Valentin. The mere thought of it tainted and cheapened his memories of the romantic moments they had shared. These anguished thoughts probably implied to him that his opening up of his heart to her had perhaps been no more meaningful to her than those cheap "magic tricks" of that elderly and disgusting con man. To contemplate that idea meant the death of his dream of love (and hence the existential death of his own soul), and he could not bear it – especially when Valentin was standing there taunting him, and the gun was lying there on the table next to him. But Francoise, crying out in Clara’s bed at the end and delirious with grief, was different. For the innocent Francoise, the authentic commitment had reached totality. Though Francois’s affair with Clara had worried her and made her hesitant, she forgives him. She says it was not his fault, that she knows that he really loves her, and that she really loves him.
★★★★

“Le Quai des Brumes” - Marcel Carne (1938)

Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak, 1939) were the two greatest collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, both films being far superior to their more celebrated but somewhat overblown Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945). Both Le Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se Lève were existentialist films noir, although they were classified at the time as examples of “poetic realism”, a term that now only applies to a few French films (mostly scripted by Prévert) made in the 1930s. Le Quai des Brumes is the more explicitly philosophical work, but its great strength lies not so much in its philosophical musings, but in the romantic relationship between its two main stars, Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan, in the last half hour fo the film. In other respects the films mannered stylistics may be off-putting to some modern viewers.

The story of Le Quai des Brumes is one of continual gloom and depression from the very outset. All of the principal characters are pessimistic and weary of life, and the expressionistic production values consistently maintain an environment shrouded in the fog and murky shadows of French seaport Le Havre. The pervading romantic mood is also considerably enhanced by the Maurice Jaubert's sombre background music. Carné seems to have wanted to present a visual tone poem dedicated to melancholia, and the details of the crime plot that drives much of the action seem to be of only secondary importance. In most narratives, there are two types of plot themes: one type based primarily on action and attainment in the environment, and the other type based on personal relationships in the story. Usually these narrative types are intertwined, so that the protagonist might both solve the murder mystery and win the heart of his beloved. In Le Quai des Brumes there are both types of narratives present, a criminal plot and a developing relationship, but the criminal plot seems to be almost window dressing compared to the relationship between Gabin and Morgan. In fact in the prints of the film available today, some of the key details of the criminal plot are somewhat unclear.

The story begins with a French soldier coming alone to Le Havre, and it proceeds in three main sections.

1. Setting the Scene (about 22 minutes). The French soldier, Jean, has recently served in the colonial army in Indochina and hitches a ride with a truck driver into Le Havre. The soldier may be a deserter, and it is clear that he wants to hide from the authorities. He runs into a drunk, known as “Half-Pint”, who guides him to a seedy, out-of-the-way tavern, Panama’s, along the coast near the harbour. Meanwhile the action cuts to a nightclub where two gangsters are attempting to bully an elderly gentleman, Zabel (played flamboyantly by Michel Simon, with his signature quirky voice and awkward physical mannerisms). The gangsters, the leader of whom is Lucien, are searching for the whereabouts of someone named “Maurice”. Back with Jean, he arrives at Panama’s, where he meets Michel, a gloomy, philosophical painter, who speaks longingly of the temptations of suicide and the hopelessness of existence. Jean also meets a beautiful young lady, Nelly, who he takes to be a prostitute.
2. Zabel and the Gangsters. Lucien and his thugs show up at Panama’s looking for Zabel (and perhaps Maurice – it is only later that we learn that Zabel has already killed Maurice and has dumped the body near Panama’s). A gunfight breaks out between the tavern proprietor and the gangsters, ultimately driving them away. At daybreak, Jean and Nelly, now casually friendly, walk into town, where they encounter Lucien and his men. After Lucien rudely tries to grab and embrace Nelly, Jean humiliatingly roughs him up in front of his own men and drives him off. Jean and Nelly then part, promising to meet that night at a street fair. Meanwhile, back at Panama’s, the painter Michel has committed the foretold suicide by drowning himself in the sea. The scene now shifts to Zabel’s gift shop in town, which is first visited by Lucien and the gangsters (who are still demanding something from Zabel) and then by Nelly, who turns out to be Zabel’s goddaughter. Jean happens to wander into the same shop, and discovers Nelly there and her relationship with Zabel.
3. Jean and Nelly. Panama gives Michel’s clothes, passport, and cash to Jean, which give him the new identity he needs to escape on a ship. After arranging passage on a ship headed to Venezuela the next day, Jean meets Nelly at the street fair. This is 65 minutes into the 91-minute film, and the narrative focus now shifts to their relationship, which has been minimal up to this point. Nelly melts before Jean, and they kiss passionately. While enjoying a ride at the fair’s bumper car concession, they encounter Lucien again, and once again, Jean slaps the bully around in a humiliating fashion. Jean and Nelly then continue their romancing and spend the night together in a hotel room. The next morning the lovers part, and Jean boards the ship bound for Venezuela. But after a few minutes, Jean wants to see Nelly one last time and runs back into town to find her. He discovers her with Zabel, who has admitted to murdering Maurice and is now throttling Nelly. Jean brutally bludgeons Zabel to death with a brick, but on his way back to the ship, he is shot to death by Lucien, who had been waiting for him. Jean dies in Nelly’s arms.

The principal attraction of Le Quai des Brumes is the comprehensive atmosphere of existential despair that pervades the entire film. In this connection the criminal action narrative is relatively confused and ultimately unresolved. The driving element in the film is the romantic narrative, which only really picks up after 65 minutes of the film. Prior to that point, although we expect that there will be something between Nelly and Jean, there relationship is hardly more than that of passing acquaintances. One could view the preceding action narrative as merely a setup that provides the noirish background and circumstances to their story.

Consider how the action plot starts off and then peters out. In part 1, we are introduced to a set of characters who all appear to have some significant narrative weight and are given some attention: Lucien, Zabel, Jean, Panama, Half Pint, Michel, and Nelly. There is also the mysterious Maurice. Yet Panama, Half Pint, and Michel quickly fade away into insignificance in Part 2, despite their atmospheric presences in Part 1. Maurice never appears (there were plans to show his severed head contained in a package, but this shot was cut by the censors). We never learn what business Lucien has with Zabel, and Nelly never tells whatever she knows to Jean about these circumstances. So the criminal action plot is more or less a red herring all the way, despite occupying much of the film. Nevertheless, the film is worthwhile to me, because of the hypnotic charm of the romantic tragedy that takes over the story in the last 25 minutes of the film and which is worthy of comparison to von Sternberg’s dream-like cinematic meditations. After the previous doleful proceedings, in which everyone was either glum or passively resigned to a dead-end existence, Nelly erupts with a passionate love for Jean and sweeps the two of them into romantic hopefulness. This dramatic appearance of hope had been cinematically foreshadowed by the depiction of natural innocence in the form of a little mongrel dog first befriending Jean early on and then tagging after him through much of the film.

Jean Gabin had emerged as a leading French star by the late 1930s, but the precise nature of his charisma is not easy to grasp. He is not tall, does not have an athletic physique, and is not particularly handsome. Perhaps as a consequence he has been compared to Humphrey Bogart, although his persona is quite different from Bogart’s. He represents a kind of gritty, working class hero, who is usually not demonstrative, but who holds strong passions inside and out of view. So it is in this film. At times he explodes with anger over his pent-up frustrations. He holds things in reserve, but when goaded into it, he’s a man of action, not words. Early on at Panama’s, he blows up at Michel’s melancholy musings about art and suicide, saying that he hasn’t eaten in two days and was fed up with such self-indulgent talk. Up to that point he had not shown outward signs of hunger, an example of how he typically held his feelings in check. Later when he sees Lucien hassling Nelly on the street, he blows up again and furiously slaps Lucien rudely across the face. In this explosion, he reveals his underlying, passionate nature. He repeats this violence on Lucien at the town fair, and when he finally beats Zabel to death with a brick, it is a shockingly violent scene that exposes the tragic flaw of his character.

Nelly, who is a 17-year-old-girl in the story, is played superbly by Michele Morgan in her first major role. Although to me she looks older than 17, she was actually that same age at the time of the filming. Her convincing looks of rapture are what stay in the mind after the film is finished. The mise-en-scene in Part 3, showing their mounting ardour, carries the audience along with them. This is a brilliant depiction of the sudden rise of hope and exhilaration that changes the world from shadows into sunlight. But at the end, dark fate puts and end to their dreams, the little dog runs a way, and the dreary port of shadows returns.
★★★½