Le Port du désir (1955) - film review

Captain Le Quévic intends to raise a sunken ship at the entrance to the port of Marseilles, not knowing that it contains the body of a murdered woman.  The ship’s owner, a local gangster named Black, plans to sabotage the operation, since he was the man who killed the woman to prevent her from revealing his crooked activities.  To that end, he bribes Le Quévic’s young diver, Michel, to blow up the wreck with explosives.  When he discovers the truth, Michel decides to flee with the dead woman’s sister, Martine, with whom he has fallen in love.  Angered by this betrayal, Black captures Martine, so that he can coerce Michel into carrying out his orders...

Le Port du désir is a film which was clearly influenced by contemporary American film noir and has much in common with another worthy example of French film noir, Du rififi chez les hommes (directed by Jules Dassin), which was released the same year.  What is striking about both of these two films, and what sets them apart from the vast majority of noir-influenced French crime-thrillers of this period, is the brutal realism that is achieved through the use of natural locations, depictions of no holds barred violence and a grittier, almost neo-realist approach to cinematography.

Unlike Dassin’s film, which is universally acknowledged as a classic film noir thriller, Le Port du désir is a somewhat overlooked work, although it does merit wider appreciation.  It was directed by Edmond T. Gréville, who made several memorable films in France and one or two in Hollywood, notably Princess Tam Tam (1935) (starring Josephine Baker) and Brief Ecstasy (1937).  An underrated auteur and brilliant technician who was often ahead of his time, Gréville achieved a very distinctive style in his films that appears to have been greatly influenced by the best in America cinema.  The moody use of chiaroscuro lighting and ambitious fluid camerawork that we find in his films certainly invites a comparison with the classier American film noir thrillers.  There are even some touches of Hitchcockian suspense, such as the sequence in Le Port du désir where the principal baddy’s henchman attempts to shoot "the dancer who knew to much" through a moving train.

The most well-known actor in this film is of course Jean Gabin, although at the time he was at an early stage in his remarkable return to stardom after several years in comparative obscurity.  (His flight to Hollywood during WWII did little for his image and very nearly finished off his career.)  When the film was released, its real star was Henri Vidal, a charismatic, talanted and very popular young actor who would die a few years later, at the age of 40, from a heart attack.  This is more Vidal’s film than Gabin’s, the latter’s contribution being pretty well reduced to that of a supporting character.

What is particularly commendable about Le Port du désir is the imaginative way in which it is shot, particularly its remarkable underwater sequences.  The latter were filmed with support from Louis Malle who, a short while later, would work with Jacques-Yves Cousteau on the ground-breaking underwater documentary Le Monde du silence (1956), before embarking on a hugely successful and highly influential filmmaking career of his own.

© James Travers 2011

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