Le Quai des brumes 1938

Le Quai des brumes, released in English as Port of Shadows, is the film that best sums up French poetic realism, the gloomy, romantic style of the late 1930s. Jean Gabin plays Jean, an army deserter who arrives at night in the port of Le Havre hoping to leave France. In a shack on the waterfront he meets Nelly, a seventeen-year-old played by Michèle Morgan in a beret and a transparent raincoat. They fall in love in two days, against the fog, the petty gangsters and Nelly's sinister guardian. The writer Jacques Prévert, the director Marcel Carné, the set designer Alexandre Trauner and the composer Maurice Jaubert made it together, and the film won the Prix Louis-Delluc. Its line "T'as d'beaux yeux, tu sais" ("You've got lovely eyes, you know") is still quoted in France today.

A deserter in the fog

Jean gets a lift into Le Havre from a lorry driver and nearly runs over a dog, which then follows him for the rest of the film. He ends up at Panama's, a ramshackle bar at the end of the harbour where the owner asks no questions. There he finds a painter who is weary of life, and Nelly, who has run away from Zabel, her guardian. Zabel, who keeps a gloomy junk shop, is played by Michel Simon with oily menace.

A small-time gangster, Lucien, played by Pierre Brasseur, wants Nelly too and wants to humiliate Jean. The painter's clothes and papers, which he leaves behind before he disappears, give Jean a way out on a ship to Venezuela. All he has to do is leave. He cannot.

Poetic realism in one film

The term poetic realism describes French films of the 1930s that set fatalistic love stories in working-class or criminal milieux: docks, cheap hotels, bars, rain and fog. Duvivier's Pépé le Moko is another key example. Carné and Prévert took the formula furthest, here and in Le Jour se lève (1939).

The look of the film matters as much as its story. The German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, who had worked on Metropolis, gives the night a soft grey glow. Trauner built the port and the shack in the studio, so that every wet cobble and dangling lamp is placed with care. Jaubert's score is restrained and sad.

Gabin and Morgan

By 1938 Gabin was the face of French cinema: the decent working man doomed by fate. Here he is gentler than usual, sullen but tender with Nelly and the dog. Morgan was eighteen when the film came out and it made her a star. Her calm, pale face under the beret became an image of the period. The two were paired again in Remorques (1941).

Trouble with the censors

The film was produced at UFA in Germany at first, and the German studio withdrew because of the deserter theme. The French army was also unhappy that a soldier deserts and that the uniform appears on screen in such a story. After the defeat of 1940, the Vichy regime blamed films like this for spreading defeatism. Carné is said to have replied that you don't blame the barometer for the storm.

Is it still worth seeing?

Yes. The dialogue can sound theatrical and the gangsters are cardboard, but the mood is complete and the last ten minutes still hurt. It is the best place to start with Carné before his masterpiece, Les Enfants du paradis. For the wider picture, see the best French films of the 1930s.