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France right before the war, Le Havre, the outpost on the edge of the world. "Quel sale brouillard!" The deserter (Jean Gabin) on the road, hungry, "not good at fancy phrases," grudgingly fond of stray mutts. His opposite number is the merchant (Michel Simon) with a yen for religious music and designs on his teenage goddaughter (Michèle Morgan), "to love like Romeo when you resemble Bluebeard" is his plight. Paths cross at the dockside inn run by the old traveler (Édouard Delmont), the backroom encounter of soldier and runaway is promptly interrupted by gunshots outside. The merry rummy (Raymond Aimos), the suicidal artist (Robert Le Vigan) who paints "the things behind the things," and the sniffling hoodlum (Pierre Brasseur) have their parts to play. "We're all just passing through." Marcel Carné finding his sweet spot, voluptuous gloom enveloping Jacques Prévert's poetry. Archetypes in the void (cp. Mayo's The Petrified Forest), Gabin's toughness in military uniform and Morgan's severity in raincoat and beret dissolving into a gaze of pure yearning between hotel sheets. (Happiness is fleeting for lovers in this world, even at the fairgrounds despair is just around the bend.) Gray views of the wharf point up the debt to Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters, the impossible dream is a ship headed to Venezuela, its whistle underscores the departing canine soul. "Lighting like the catacombs," the model vessel shattered by a bullet ("thirty-two years in a bottle..."), the clock-anchor. There's solitude and there's death, somewhere in between there's a flash of romance to alleviate things or perhaps exacerbate them. "Do you love life?" "It has its moments." A crucial film for early Bergman, a fatalistic template expanded by Carné and Prévert in Le Jour se Lève. With René Génin, Jenny Burnay and Marcel Pérès. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |