Le jour se lève

Directed by Marcel Carné in 1939 from a script by the poet Jacques Prévert, Le jour se lève is the summit of French poetic realism, the fatalistic style that defined French cinema in the years before the Occupation. Its reputation was such that when Hollywood remade it in 1947, the studio reportedly tried to buy up and destroy every print of the original. Fortunately, the attempt failed.

Jean Gabin, the era's emblematic working-class hero, plays François, a foundry worker barricaded in his top-floor room as the police gather below; Arletty and a silkily villainous Jules Berry circle the romance that has undone him. Carné and his designer Alexandre Trauner build the whole film around that single besieged building, and use flashback, still a novelty in 1939, to fold the past into the present with a fluency that would later shape the structure of film noir. Maurice Jaubert's score gives the long night its mournful weight.

The wartime authorities banned it for a time as demoralising. It was later restored and reclaimed as a classic, and it regularly appears among the greatest French films ever made, a touchstone for critics of the period. Its doomed romanticism (the smoke and rain, the dance-hall light, the worker cornered by fate) fixed an image of pre-war France that later generations of film-makers have returned to again and again.