Port of Shadows

The definitive statement of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) reunited the director with the screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and the star Jean Gabin, and won the Prix Louis Delluc. Adapted from a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, it crystallised the mood of fatalism that hung over France on the eve of war.

Gabin plays the deserter seeking passage out of Le Havre; Michèle Morgan, luminous in a beret and transparent raincoat, is the young woman who draws him into a love that the world seems determined to crush, with Michel Simon as her sinister guardian. Carné and the designer Alexandre Trauner conjure a studio-built harbour of fog, neon and wet cobbles — a self-contained world of doomed romance and underworld menace.

Some Vichy ideologues later blamed films like this for sapping French morale, a backhanded testament to its emotional power. Its mist-shrouded imagery and its vision of love snatched at the edge of catastrophe became a template for film noir and for cinematic romanticism generally. Beautiful, despairing and impeccably crafted, it remains the film by which poetic realism is best remembered. Michèle Morgan's gaze and that translucent raincoat became enduring icons of French cinema, fixing the film in the national memory. Carné and Prévert would reunite for further collaborations, but few matched the concentrated despair and beauty achieved here.