Le jour se lève (1939)
(Daybreak)
Country: FR
Technical: bw 95m
Director: Marcel Carné
Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent
Synopsis:
A working man falls for a flower seller, but sees her with a devious vaudevillian and catches his glamorous assistant on the rebound. However, true love rankles, and the entertainer grows jealous.
Review:
On the brink of war, Carné and Prévert produced this masterpiece of poetic realism, in which we see a madman commit a murder, and then flashback through his thoughts to understand why. In other words, sympathy for the common man is juxtaposed with the banal details of his work, his love life and his top-floor bedsitter. Meanwhile outside, the implacable police confronts an empathetic mob: not hard to see the débâcle of the Popular Front giving way to the reactionary forces that would lead to a collaborationist government one year later. Gabin was at the peak of his best period, and the settings are superbly realised at the Billancourt studios, from the vertiginous boarding house building and the triangular junction it dominates, to the railside alleyway where the florist lives.
(Daybreak)
Country: FR
Technical: bw 95m
Director: Marcel Carné
Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent
Synopsis:
A working man falls for a flower seller, but sees her with a devious vaudevillian and catches his glamorous assistant on the rebound. However, true love rankles, and the entertainer grows jealous.
Review:
On the brink of war, Carné and Prévert produced this masterpiece of poetic realism, in which we see a madman commit a murder, and then flashback through his thoughts to understand why. In other words, sympathy for the common man is juxtaposed with the banal details of his work, his love life and his top-floor bedsitter. Meanwhile outside, the implacable police confronts an empathetic mob: not hard to see the débâcle of the Popular Front giving way to the reactionary forces that would lead to a collaborationist government one year later. Gabin was at the peak of his best period, and the settings are superbly realised at the Billancourt studios, from the vertiginous boarding house building and the triangular junction it dominates, to the railside alleyway where the florist lives.
(Daybreak)
Country: FR
Technical: bw 95m
Director: Marcel Carné
Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent
Synopsis:
A working man falls for a flower seller, but sees her with a devious vaudevillian and catches his glamorous assistant on the rebound. However, true love rankles, and the entertainer grows jealous.
Review:
On the brink of war, Carné and Prévert produced this masterpiece of poetic realism, in which we see a madman commit a murder, and then flashback through his thoughts to understand why. In other words, sympathy for the common man is juxtaposed with the banal details of his work, his love life and his top-floor bedsitter. Meanwhile outside, the implacable police confronts an empathetic mob: not hard to see the débâcle of the Popular Front giving way to the reactionary forces that would lead to a collaborationist government one year later. Gabin was at the peak of his best period, and the settings are superbly realised at the Billancourt studios, from the vertiginous boarding house building and the triangular junction it dominates, to the railside alleyway where the florist lives.