Port of Shadows

Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) is the purest statement of French poetic realism. It reunited the director with the screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and with the star Jean Gabin, and it won the Prix Louis Delluc. Adapted from a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, it caught 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 the whole world seems set against, and Michel Simon is her sinister guardian. Carné and the designer Alexandre Trauner built their harbour in the studio out of fog, neon and wet cobbles, a closed world of fatalistic romance and underworld menace.

Some Vichy ideologues later blamed films like this one for sapping French morale, which tells you how hard it hit. Its mist-shrouded imagery, and its idea of love snatched at the edge of catastrophe, became a template for film noir and for screen romanticism in general. Morgan's gaze and that translucent raincoat became icons of French cinema and fixed the film in the national memory. It is despairing and beautifully made, and it is still the film by which poetic realism is best remembered. Carné and Prévert would work together again, but rarely with despair and beauty this concentrated.