Main Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent, Mady Berry, Jacques Baumer
Release Year: 1939
Country: FR
Run Time: 85 minutes
Plot
Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert's classic of French poetic realism stars Jean Gabin in one of his most famous roles as Francois, a rough, barrel-chested loner who hides out in his apartment awaiting for the police to arrive. Francois has killed a man in a crime of passion, the slimy lothario Valentin (Jules Berry). As he listens in the darkness of his Normandy apartment to the police sirens closing in and getting louder, he recalls the two women that he loved -- Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and Clara (Arletty) -- and the evil Valentin, who stole both their hearts and forced Francois into this melancholy plight. The film was later re-made in Hollywood as The Long Night. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
An exemplar of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (1939) turns a murder story into an evocative examination of a man trapped by circumstances beyond his control. In the script by Carné's main collaborator Jacques Prévert, Jean Gabin's working-class François shoots a man and holes up in his room, thinking back, in an impeccably structured flashback, to the events that brought him to that moment. Carné's camera does not shy away from the desperate, claustrophobic details of working-class life, yet the possibility for human connection gives François's existence hope, until the sadistic Valentin intervenes. The play of light and shadows as François waits out the night invests the surroundings' realistic drabness with a poetic sense of doom, matching the implacable fate that awaits the decent, tormented man. Trading on Gabin's image as a strong yet tender-hearted hero, Le jour se lève's François was seen as not just a man condemned by his class and human weakness but also the image of a country about to be overcome by the diabolical outside forces of World War II. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Le Jour se lève (or Daybreak) is a 1939 French film directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, based on a story by Jacques Viot. It is considered one of the principal examples of the French film movement known as poetic realism.
The film was remade as The Long Night (1947), with Henry Fonda in the Gabin role. In 1952, it was included in the first Sight and Sound top ten greatest films list.
The film begins with foundry worker François (Jean Gabin) shooting and killing Valentin (Jules Berry). François then locks himself in his room in a guest house at the top of many flights of stairs. He is soon besieged by the police, who fail in an attempt to shoot themselves into the room, as François barricades himself in.
In a series of flashbacks punctuated by glimpses of the present, it is revealed that François had become involved with both the the naive young florist Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), and the more experienced Clara (Arletty), who until she met François had been the assistant in Valentin's performing dog act. It becomes clear that the manipulative Valentin, an older man, had himself been involved with both women, and he becomes jealous of François (at one point, mendaciously telling François that he, Valentin, was Françoise's father, although both she and François had grown up in orphanages). Finally Valentin confronts François in his room, bringing with him the gun with which François eventually shoots him.
As we return to the present, François continues to chain-smoke nervously in his room. Françoise, having learned of his plight, has become delirious and is being tended to by Clara in her room at a nearby hotel. Then, two policemen climb over the roof of François's building, preparing to throw tear gas grenades through the window of François's room. Before they can do so, François, consumed with despair, shoots himself in the heart. The film ends with tear gas clouds filling the room around his lifeless body.
Le Jour se lève was released in France in June 1939, and it was shown in the USA in the following year. In France in 1940 however, it was banned by the Vichy government on the grounds that it was demoralising and had contributed to the nation's defeat. After the end of the war, the film was shown again to wide acclaim. In 1947 it was again suppressed when RKO wanted to remake the film in Hollywood (as The Long Night). The company acquired the distribution rights of the French film and sought to buy up and destroy every copy of the film that they could obtain. For a time it was feared that that they had been successful and that the film was lost, but it re-appeared in the 1950s and has subsequently stood alongside Les Enfants du paradis as one of the finest achievements of the partnership of Carné and Prévert.[1]
References
^ "Le Jour se lève", in Nicholas Thomas (ed) International Dictionary of Films and Filmmaking: 1: Films, 1990, Chicago & London: St James Press, p.447; "Le Jour se lève", in Liz-Anne Bawden (ed) The Oxford Companion to Film, 1976, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.373.
La Marie du port (1950) ·Juliette, or Key of Dreams (1951) ·Thérèse Raquin (1953) ·Air of Paris (1954) ·The Country I Come From (1956) ·The Cheaters (1958)
1960s
Wasteland (1960) ·Chicken Feed for Little Birds (1963) ·Three Rooms in Manhattan (1965) ·Young Wolves (1968)
1970s
Law Breakers (1971) ·The Marvelous Visit (1974) ·The Bible (1977)
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