Leur dernière nuit (1953)
Directed by Georges Lacombe

Film Review

Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) is the film that is widely credited with both establishing the polar as a major genre in French cinema and allowing the actor Jean Gabin to make his big comeback after a fairly desultory decade following his glory years of the 1930s.  Neither of these popular misconceptions is true.  The polar - a distinctly Gallic form of film noir - had been gestating in France since the 1930s, Jean Renoir's La Nuit du carrefour (1932) offering an effective early template for the genre - so by the early 1950s it was already prominent in French cinema, helped by the popularity of noir imports from the US, which French directors were not slow to emulate.  It was through his association with French film noir in the late 1940s, early 1950s that Gabin swiftly regained his popularity, in films that included Georges Lacombe's Martin Roumagnac (1946), Miroir (1947) and La Vierge du Rhin (1953).  Lacombe's Leur dernière nuit was the noir crime-drama that Gabin made just before Grisbi and in many ways it is a forerunner for the latter, more celebrated film - mainly because it shows the actor now comfortably settled into his new screen persona as the hard-as-nails, cool as a cucumber godfather figure.

Leur dernière nuit was the last - and arguably best - of the three films directed by Georges Lacombe with Jean Gabin in the lead role.  Like the two preceding films, Martin Roumagnac and La Nuit est mon royaume (1951), it is primarily a realist melodrama judiciously embroidered with noir aesthetics, but it stands apart because of the very noticeable influence of American and (possibly) British film noir.  Films such as Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) are likely to have influenced Lacombe greatly, both in the film's heightened realism and its impressive modern-looking technical design.  There are three sequences in Leur dernière nuit in which this is glaringly evident - a spectacular robbery and chase sequence where Gabin's escape in an armoured van is thwarted by a squad of armed police motorcyclists, a brutal revenge murder and the shocking denouement on the banks of the River Seine, which ends with Gabin being shot down whilst trying to escape.  These flagrant incursions of American-style noir brutality lend the film a harder, more realistic edge that is lacking in earlier French noir offerings and, it can be argued, resulted in Leur dernière nuit having a far greater impact on subsequent polars in French cinema than Jacques Becker's 1954 classic, although Touchez pas au grisbi is manifestly a far superior, much classier film.

Apparently based on a short story by Jacques Constant, Leur dernière nuit has many obvious plot similarities with Marcel Carné's pre-war masterpiece Le Quai des brumes (1938), which had featured Jean Gabin in his most iconic role for the period, that of the doomed proletarian romantic.  In both films, Gabin plays a desperate fugitive who finds some measure of redemption through an unexpected 'pure' romance with an almost perfect example of womanhood, before Fate catches up with him and foists on him an ignominious early death.  The endings of the two films are virtual identical and it is tempting to dismiss Lacombe's film as a casual rip-off of a far more accomplished work.  Both in style and plot detail, however, Leur dernière nuit is quite different from Carné's film, and has not a trace of the poetic realism that strongly defined the latter director's 1930s oeuvre.  Lacombe's approach is trenchantly realist throughout (as it is for most of his films), evidenced by his far greater use of real locations for the exteriors (Carné always preferred studio mock-ups to give him the greatest possible control over his mise-en-scène).  Lacking the distinctive poetry of Carné and the blunt cynicism of Duvivier, Lacombe's take on film noir is set well apart from that of his peers, much nearer to the American model - with a downbeat grittiness and visual style that is closer to drama-documentary (exemplified by such films as Call Northside 777 and The House on 92nd Street) than the heavily stylised (almost expressionistic) melodrama of some of his French contemporaries.

Like Marcel Carné's La Marie du port (1950), Leur dernière nuit was a crucial film for Gabin in the establishment of his post-war screen persona.  As in Raymond Lamy's Miroir (1947), the actor plays a character with a dual identity - a hardened gangster masquerading as a respectable man about town.  These two distinct character types would be the two that Gabin would alternate between for the remainder of his career and it is interesting to see how effectively he melds them in Lacombe's film, convincingly making them two sides of the same coin through a performance that is assuredly one of his finest.  There is also a slight hangover from Gabin's pre-war years, his character Ruffin far more closely resembling the sympathetic doomed hero of Carné's pessimistic classics than the cynical Cagney-like villain of Lamy's 1947 film.  As the film tacitly makes clear, Ruffin was not born a criminal.  He is a man who, through a series of terrible personal misfortunes, was driven to a life of crime when bourgeois society turned against him and left him with few other options for survival.

Gabin's intimate on-screen affair with Michèle Morgan in Le Quai des brumes is almost exactly mirrored by his touching romance with Madeleine Robinson (an actress of comparable renown and ability) in Leur dernière nuit.  It is in the scenes with Robinson's redeeming guardian angel that the humanity of Gabin's character is revealed with great tact and poignancy.  How strongly these contrast with the unimaginably grim sequence in which Gabin's career criminal pursues a personal vendetta and brutally guns down the man who betrayed him - in a scene that is more than vaguely reminiscent of a similarly nasty revenge killing in Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937).  It is here, iconically arrayed in a light raincoat, hat and dark glasses, that Gabin's famous gangster persona makes his grand entrance - the merciless hoodlum that would feature so prominently in French cinema throughout the following two decades.

Film Synopsis

Newly qualified to work as a teacher Madeleine Marsan, a single woman in her early thirties, leaves her home in Limoges and heads for Paris to look for a teaching post.   She finds accommodation at a friendly boarding house and immediately sets about looking for work, without success.  As luck would have it, one of her fellow boarders is Pierre Ruffin, the respected director of one of the city's libraries.  He uses his influence to find Madeleine a suitable place in a school.  Grateful for this act of kindness, the young woman soon begins to develop tender feelings for her benefactor, not knowing that he is in fact the head of a notorious gang of criminals - known to his underworld associates as Monsieur Fernand.  Ruffin's latest daring hold-up goes spectacularly awry when he is pursued and caught by armed police motorcyclists.  Interrogated by Inspector Dupré, Ruffin is careful to say nothing that will incriminate him.

Whilst being driven across town in a police van Ruffin manages to escape, his intention being to flee to Belgium as soon as possible.  But first, he has one vital task to perform - to execute the man who betrayed him, his fence Pérez.  This done, he enlists Madeleine's help in his escape plan.  She willingly agrees to lend her support, first by collecting the stash of money he has hidden away in his room at the boarding house, then by obtaining train tickets.  By now, the police are out in force, scouring the area in a determined effort to capture the dangerous fugitive.  Accepting Madeleine's advice that he should lie low for a few days, Ruffin checks into a cheap hotel and keeps a low profile until it is safe for him to execute his plan of escape.  Madeleine's affectionate presence helps to make these anxious hours more bearable.  Under the cover of night, Ruffin leaves the hotel and heads for the quayside, planning to hide himself aboard a barge bound for Belgium.  He is spotted by the police but in his attempt to run away he is shot dead and falls into the river, under the eyes of the only woman who truly loved him.