The French Roots of Noir: Two Films by Marcel Carné with Jean Gabin

...For the Vive la France Blogathon...

In 1946 four relatively recent American films inspired Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank to pen an article for the August 1946 issue of the newly launched film periodical L'Écran français. Titled “A New Kind of Police Drama: the Criminal Adventure,” the article pointed out that these films - The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet - seemed more concerned with psychological motivations and undercurrents than crime solving. In his piece, Frank would use the term film noir and from then on be given credit for coining the phrase.

The research of film studies professor Charles O’Brien, among others, many years later would reveal that the term film noir had been in use in France since the late 1930s in reviews and articles written about a new trend in French films.

Marcel Carné

Director Marcel Carné (1900 – 1990), who began his career as a film critic but would soon make his way behind the camera, was one of the filmmakers working in this emerging genre that would eventually be known as “poetic realism.” Moody and washed in light and shadow, these films fused romanticism with a potent dose of the fatalism of street-life. The stories often followed the destinies of troubled characters who, yearning to break out of dead-end lives, would fall into tangled love affairs, concoct fanciful schemes, suffer and often die. Marcel Carné directed two masterpieces of the genre, Le quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (1938) and Le jour se lève/Daybreak (1939), with French screen legend Jean Gabin (1904 – 1976) starring in both.

When he began his first film with Carné in 1938, Jean Gabin was in the early days of what would become lifelong stardom and a legendary career. He'd shot to fame with Julien Duvivier’s La bandera (1935) and, more recently, had starred in two poetic realist films that would become classics of the genre, Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) and Jean Renoir’s anti-war classic, La Grande Illusion/Grand Illusion (1937). Onscreen Gabin was a powerfully charismatic and magnetic actor, and his specialty was the "everyman."  Always sympathetic, he often portrayed petty criminals, legionnaires or laborers whose lives have taken a nasty twist or turn and find themselves in a corner and out of time.

By the time Le quai des brumes was ready to go into production, Carné had put together an exquisite team of off-camera artists: screenwriter Jacques Prévert, production designer Alexandre Trauner (Oscar winner for 1960's The Apartment) and composer Maurice Jaubert, who would sadly be lost in World War II. Prévert, also a surrealist poet, is credited with complementing Carné’s genius for composition and staging with his own witty and lyrical way with words, adding “poetry” to Carné’s stylized “realism.” Bringing in Jean Gabin to star would turn out to be a coup de maître.

Michele Morgan and Jean Gabin in Le quai des brumes (1938)

Gabin portrays Jean, a deserter from the French colonial army in Le quai des brumes. With dreams of sailing to Venezuela and a new life, he makes his way to the misty port city of Le Havre where he plans to make his departure by ship.  Jean will wait on the waterfront, commiserating with other disaffected misfits in a rundown bar and meeting a beautiful damsel in distress named Nelly (Michele Morgan). Life in this dreary milieu becomes even more complicated for Jean; he’s fallen in love with Nelly and been drawn into her dangerous world. After finally boarding his ship to freedom, Jean is unable resist coming back to say goodbye. In the end, his parting words to her will be, “Kiss me. Quick. We have no time.” The French government reacted to the film's dark narrative by declaring that if France lost the war, Le quai des brumes could take the blame. Carné replied with some chagrin, “you do not blame a barometer for a storm.”

In Le quai des brumes the protagonist's fate unfolds gradually, as the story progresses, but in Le jour se lève the hero's future can be predicted from the start. The film opens with the crack of a gunshot and the sight of its victim toppling down a stairwell.  It is through a series of flashbacks that we learn how Francois (Gabin) would come to be a killer and end up barricaded in his cramped room at the top of the stairs, under siege by police. Francois is a foundry worker with few prospects, but a goodhearted, earnest man. He will meet Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent), a young woman who dreams of a much finer life, and he will fall for her...hard. When she attracts the attentions of a slick old seducer (Jules Berry), Francois will be driven to the crime of passion that seals his fate.

Jean Gabin and Arletty in Le jour se lève (1939)

Like Le quai des brumes, this film’s downbeat atmosphere, storyline and ending are affecting and Gabin’s “beautiful loser” character provides a resonant core around which Carne’s carefully constructed world without hope can spin.  With his knowing eyes, low growl of a voice and expressive face, Gabin could articulate the state of his character’s heart, soul and mind with a handful of words or none at all.

Le jour se lève was released in June 1939, but World War II began in September and, once in power in 1940, France's Vichy government would pronounce the film “demoralizing” and it would be banned until the war's end.

Time would pass before filmmaking in France could begin to recover from World War II and the occupation. Once it did, what the war wrought on the country was reflected on its theater screens. Cinematic trends from around the world like American noir and Italian neorealism were an influence as well. From the late ‘40s, crime films coming out of France took on a real-world, hardboiled quality epitomized by the noirish thrillers of Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville and expatriate American Jules Dassin.

Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin and Jeanne Moreau in Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)

Marcel Carné and Jean Gabin would make their final films together in the post-war era, La Marie du port/Marie of the Port (1950) and L’air de Paris/The Air of Paris (1954). Gabin would appear in two films in 1954; the first was Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi and the second was L’air de Paris. He would go on to win the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival that year for his performances in both films and his career would be revitalized.  Gabin then went on to make nearly 50 more films over the next 22 years. A legend to the end, he headed the cast of his final film in 1976, his final year, in the befitting role of a "master thief."

Marcel Carné’s later career did not turn out quite so well. Though he lived to age 90, his work past age 45 was mostly ignored. Unfortunately for Carné, in the early '50s he became a prime target of scorn from a certain young critic at Cahiers du Cinema, a critic who went on to become one of the iconic directors of the French New Wave. But, in the end, Marcel Carnés reputation would endure thanks to those brooding, evocative films of the 1930s and to Les enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise (1945), his great masterpiece and the most popular and widely acclaimed French film of all time. 

Note: A previous version of an article on this subject appeared in the Nov./Dec. 2018 issue of The Dark Pages, the film noir newsletter.

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