578 - Port of Shadows, France, 1938. Dir. Marcel Carné.
While this is not exactly Robert de Niro and Al Pacino facing each other in the restaurant near the airport in Michael Mann's Heat (1995), there is something poignant about seeing France's largest screen personas of the day facing off against each other. To the death.
France's great stars Jean Gabin and Michel Simon had worked together before, in G. W. Pabst's 1933 German-French comedy High and Low (not to be confused with Akira Kurosawa's 1963 Japanese crime drama High and Low), but in that film they did not play antagonists to one another and did not face each other in a showdown.
Marcel Carné, who made the great film of France, Children of Paradise (1945), is here seven years earlier making the archetypal film in the poetic realism style, one of the precursors to American film noir.
The lighting is there. And the shadows. And the fog. And the Venetian blind slats. Filmed in high-contrast black and white by Eugen Schüfftan. We discussed him when we saw Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (1960).
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/106-eyes-without-face-1960-france-dir.html
Read that blog and look at the description of the Schüfftan process. It was an impressive achievement. Also note the seminal films on which he worked in his early years.
Port of Shadows contains the waterfront. The criminals. The loner walking down the street at night. Implied deserter from the army. A man cynically guarded due to past emotional hurt.
Who hitchhikes. And grabs the other man's wheel to make him avoid hitting a dog. Who is willing to step out and go to blows over it. Who reluctantly picks up the dog as his lifetime companion.
A beautiful woman who walks into his life by chance. In the beret. In the raincoat. Who might be the love his life. And who might be the source of his undoing.
Zabel the shop owners longs for Nelly. Lucien the criminal longs for Nelly. And Maurice . . . well, where is Maurice?
So when Nelly walks into Jean's life. In the flop joint. In the adumbral docks at La Havre. He speaks simply his paradoxical mind.
He has just met her. He loves her instantly. Another shot of lightning. A coup de foudre. He knows it will not work out--not believes it will not, not doubts it will, but knows it will not. Yet he presses forward anyway. Almost joyfully. He will get what he can out of life despite fate's working against him.
She responds in like measure. She loves him back. She doubts the future. Although she is young, she lives in this place. Among these people. She has seen it already.
And while they are not exactly Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Harry and Slim in Howard Hawks' waterfront thriller To Have and Have Not (1944)--adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman--their dual banter shows forth, for this time and place, an intelligently resigned and commensurate repartee.
He has a choice to make. To board the ship for Venezuela or to stay. To take her or to leave her. He knows he loves her. There are just other things involved.
Such as perhaps Maurice is not the first one to go missing.
And there might be good reason for Jean's having gone AWOL.
So while he sits in his civvies with his paint case fumblingly pretending to be painter, and while he oh-so unfortunately runs into a real painter who grills him on his knowledge and technique, someone is dredging the bottom of the bay.
And they might just be finding his uniform. The one with the rock tied inside it.
And a body.
Who may or may not be Maurice.
Yet when Nelly finds the cufflinks on the floor and fearfully believes she knows what happened, Zabel might just disabuse her of that notion.
As he seeks to disembowel Jean with that wooden shard he has left lying out on the work table.
Someone is going to die.
It might be Jean.
It might be Nelly.
It might be Zabel.
It might be Lucien.
Or it might be someone whose name you do not even know yet.
Or more than one person.
Jealousy is a dark force.
But what is a man to do when he has the heart of a Romeo and the face of a Bluebeard?
As he says, Everybody is fussing about love; who is going to love me?
Well?
Jacques Prevert has given us the script, with his beautifully poetic lines.
And Coco Chanel has given us the costumes.
Is that not all you need to know?
If the Madame of the House of Chanel has designed the clothing, then we will in turn go to see them.
Michele Morgan plays Nelly. We saw her last week in Remorques (1941), known to us as Stormy Waters, made three years after this one.
And while it is not Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it is something that sizzles.
And simmers.
In the shadows.
Of the port.
Of the soul.
The human heart.
The human heart of darkness.
Will love overcome in time?
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