Leur dernière nuit (1953) - film review

Arriving in Paris, Madeleine Marsan rents a room in a guesthouse where she makes the acquaintance of Pierre Ruffin, a respectable municipal librarian.  Through Pierre, Madeleine finds work as a schoolteacher and soon realises that she is in love with him.  Then she discovers that Pierre is in truth the head of a band of crooks.  Caught by the police after a failed robbery, Pierre manages to escape.  With Madeleine’s help, he goes on the run.   However, the police have no intention of giving up the hunt…

Jean Gabin and Madeleine Robinson star in this respectable, if not hugely original, film policier, a genre that became extraordinarily popular in France in the 1950s.  It was the last in a series of three films Gabin made with director Georges Lacombe, after Martin Roumagnac (1946) and La Nuit est mon royaume (1951).  Lacombe’s  films are noted for their pessimistic mood and film noir atmosphere.  Here, the director evokes the style of the poetic realists of the late 1930s (notably Marcel Carné), and even concludes the film with an ending which is virtually identical to that of a classic poetic realist film, Le Quai des brumes (1938).

© James Travers 2004

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