Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Marcel Carné
Starring: Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Michel Simon, Pierre Brasseur, Édouard Delmont
The term "Film Noir" was coined by French critics when they eventually got to see the wave of dark Hollywood thrillers they missed out on while under Nazi occupation. Ironically, such films were heavily influenced, both thematically and stylistically, by the "poetic realist" films of 1930s France. These French films laid down the template for what we now think of as Noir. They often featured beaten down male protagonists who were purposely difficult to like, whose lives were ruined, either directly or indirectly, by the women they fall for. They played out in backstreets and fog shrouded docks, the sort of places where men on the run like to hide away.
Perhaps the most classic example of such Gallic Noir precursors is Marcel Carné's 1938 romantic thriller Le Quai des Brumes ("Port of Shadows"), one of the director's several collaborations with screenwriter Jacques Prévert (adapting a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan). The film sees French acting icon Jean Gabin play Jean, a deserter from the colonial army who arrives in the French port of Le Havre seeking a way out of the country. What exactly he's running from isn't exactly clear, but his talk of "the mist in his mind" suggests that it's not something he'll easily escape.
Following a local drunk, Jean is drawn to a rundown dive bar run by the eccentric Panama (Édouard Delmont). Like the desert diner in Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest, Panama's is filled with characters halfway on a journey to nowhere in particular. There's a philosophising artist (Robert Le Vigan) much like Leslie Howard in Mayo's film, and hiding away in a backroom is this film's version of Bette Davis's restless young naif. Teenager Nelly (Michèle Morgan) takes a shine to Jean in his army uniform, but he does his best to turn her away with his line of cynical patter. But just like the Jack Russell that latched onto him as soon as he entered the town, Nelly attaches herself to Jean. Perhaps initially she merely sees Jean as a way out of this God forsaken port, but as she chips away at his macho wall she begins to genuinely fall for the big lug.
In classic French fashion, Carné is heavily concerned with selling the romantic aspect of his film. We suspect from the off that these are doomed lovers (and that's before reminding ourselves of what is to befall France a year later), but we get sucked into this romance between the hard bitten brute and the delicate young girl. Neither Gabin nor Morgan are immediately striking in the manner of the stars of the era, but the more we study the love in their eyes the more handsome Gabin becomes, the more Morgan appears a great beauty.
Of course, in Noir fate has a way of sticking its leg out to trip up people just when it seems they've found freedom, contentment and love. Nelly has the small issue of her domineering and handsy uncle Zabel (Michel Simon), whom she suspects of murdering the last man she fell for. Jean makes a dangerous enemy of Lucien (Pierre Brasseur), a young wannabe mobster he emasculates with the back of his hand when Lucien tries to act the tough guy.
It all leads to an inevitably cynical ending that will later be aped and subverted by Jean-Luc Godard and Luc Besson in Breathless and Subway respectively, a mark of Carné's influence not only on Hollywood thrillers but on the maverick upstarts that would later emerge in his own nation's ever-evolving cinema. Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography would prove influential in Hollywood, his shadows and stage mist shrouding Gabin in doom while his key lights highlight the tenderness of Morgan's young face. Prevert's script is packed with the sort of cynical zingers that would become the staple of bitter Noir anti-heroes. Maurice Jaubert's score is simultaneously romantic and melancholy, a constant reminder not to get too attached to the film's lovers. In this port of shadows, love only lasts until the next boat leaves.
Le Quai des Brumes is on UK bluray and DVD now.