My favorite 20th-century French poet, Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), adapted the 1927 doom and gloom novel Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows), by (the prolific pulp novelist) Pierre Dumarchais (writing as Pierre Mac Orlan) for the screen in a 1938 noir melodrama directed by Marcel Carné (1909-1996), a year after their serial killer farce “Drôle de drame” (with Michel Simon, best remembered as the title character in Jean Renoir’s black comedy “Boudu Saved from Drowning”). Carné and Prévert and “Quai des Brumes” star Jean Gabin went on to make the even more celebrated fatalistic “Le jour se lève” (Daybreak) the next year and their greatest (not to mention longest) film, “Les enfants du paradis ” (Children of the Paradise) during the Nazi occupation (the movie was released in 1945).
In “Le Quai des Brumes” Simon plays a Le Havre port owner named Zabel, who is being threatened by a baby-faced petty gangster named Lucien (played by Pierre Brasseur, real-life father of Claude Brasseur, handsome star of Godard’s “Bande à part” and of “Black Widow”). Zabel is also the lecherous guardian of the 17-year-old Nelly (a radiant young Michèle Morgan, best known for her postwar role as a blind beauty in the adaptation of André Gide’s “La Symphonie Pastorale”).
These characters will each have significant interactions with the film’s central character and antihero, Jean, played by Jean Gabin (1904-1976), who to me looks somewhat like Spencer Tracy, but had romantic(though often violent) leading man roles that Clark Gable (or Charles Boyer…) played in Hollywood movies. Gabin had played leading roles in two great Jean Renoir films before appearing in “Quai des Brumes” (“The Lower Depths” and “Grand Illusion”) and in the title role as the doomed gang leader “Pépé le Moko” in 1937. I can’t imagine what Pauline Kael had in mind in asserting that “Quai des Brumes” began “the Jean Gabin era” in French films. It seems to me that it came in the middle, that if there was a “Jean Gabin era,” it ran from 1937-39 (though his popularity was revived in 1954 in Jacques Becker’s 1954 “Touchez pas au grisbi” and he went on to appear as Inspector Maigret in various adaptations of Georges Simenon novels. (I also disagree with Ms. Kael that “Le jour se lève” is “infinitely superior” to “Quai des Brumes”—or even superior except in having a simpler and more predictable plot.
The film begins with a signpost “Le Havre, 20 km” (which the Criterion DVD subtitles “Le Havre, 12 miles” for those metrically challenged, who are likely also not to know what or where the port of Le Havre is, IMO) in the fog, illuminated by head lights. A truck driver is flagged down by a soldier (Gabin) with whom he tries with little success to make conversation. On the outskirts of Le Havre, a small dog is on the road. Jean grabs the wheel to swerve to avoid the dog, which outrages the driver. They get out of the car to duke it out, but Jean asks “Are we really going to fight over a dog?” The driver is happy to make peace and gives Jean not only a cigarette, but the pack.
The dog follows Jean (through the rest of the movie). Jean helps (or at least keeps from falling) a drunk, who appraising that Jean is a deserter, takes him to a lonely waterfront bar that is run by a character (played by Edouard Delmont) in a Panama hat who is called “Panama” (he says he got the hat in Panama, but Panama hats are really made in Ecuador (as I know from having been to the village most famed for weaving them, Monte Cristo, as well as in Panama). Why Panama… and the despondent painter Maurice (Robert Le Vigan) or the painter’s girlfriend (Nelly) help the deserter is any viewer’s guess. (Jean says his hot temper has gotten him in trouble in the past, so, presumably, he beat up or killed someone before going on the lam.)
Nelly makes a dramatic, quintessentially noir entrance in a shiny raincoat. (It is foggy, but not raining, BTW.) She is a rather innocent femme fatale, but, nonetheless, proves to be fatale.
There are some papers that the vicious hood Lucien wants that he thinks that either Maurice or Zabel has. I have no idea what is on them… or what happens to them (though seeing that neither Maurice nor Zabel has possession of them). Zabel is very afraid of Lucien, and more than delighted to hear that Jean has “slapped him silly” (slapping instead of punching is a peculiarity for me of French gangster movies, but the encounter between Jean and Lucien shows the literal meaning of “slapped silly.” Jean was coming to the defense of Nelly, who was being manhandled by Lucien. Lucien turns out to be a coward—a typical noir villain who is all the more dangerous after being showed up.
There is much more plot (too much more!) including a suicide (banned from movies released in America at the time) and Jean and Nelly waking up in a double bed (even married couples were not allowed to be shown in the same bed by the Hollywood Production Code—into the 1960s—, let alone a 17-year-old girl and a 33-year-old-man who are not married to each other, and although the age of consent in France was 15, I suppose some will see child sexual abuse herein).
The location shots of the Le Havre harbor are particularly good, though they do not match very well visually with the scenes filmed on studio sets. Actually, both (not to mention the road at the start of the movie) are strangely depopulated (deserted city streets, particularly by night are a signature noir element). Gabin’s charisma does not work on me (no doubt pat of why I am puzzled that so many people do so much to help him!) . There are many other (more!) interesting characters, though it is Gabin who is onscreen most of the time. (If Gabin reminds me of Spencer Tracy, Morgan, at least before going to bed with Jean, reminds me of a young Barbara Stanwyck—though Morgan seems older than 17.)
Genre considerations
The introduction to the DVD collection of production stills and Francophone posters invokes “poetic realism.” Certainly Prévert was a poet, but this introduction characterizes “poetic realism” as showing “the invisible poetry in everyday life.” In addition to being oxymoronic, I do not see everyday objects (there is no everyday behavior IMO!) being poeticized in the movie. To me the movie is “naturalism”, that is, more lurid than “realism. Perhaps fog is “poetic” to some, but looking over my computer screen at it, I don’t find it so.
As Nathaniel Rich wrote, cinéma noir” is “an amorphous, foggy term” coined by the French film critic Nino Frank in 1946. Rich’s characterization of films “punctuated by violence and pervaded with a profound sense of dread and moral uncertainty. The heroes tend to be cynical, tough, and overwhelmed by sinister forces beyond their control. Stylistically, film noir is distinguished by its stark chiaroscuro cinematography…. Films are shot in black and white, lit for night, favor oblique camera angels and obsessive use of shadow, and, most importantly, take place in a city… exploring the rotten underside.”
It seems to me that “Quai des brumes” fits this description quite well. Though appearing three years before what is widely considered to be the first film noir (the third, version of The Maltese Falcon, directe by John Husto), and being French, I can check off my own checklist (which includes the same elements as Nathaniel Rich’s, but in a different order of priority) of noir attributes:
(1) it was shot in black and white (a sine qua non for my conception of a noir),
(2) mostly nocturnally,
(3) set in seedy and/or industrial sections of a city (usually a port city)
(4) amidst anomie, dread, and violence,
(5) with sinister forces (and fate?) dooming the tough protagonist (antihero),
(6) has a femme fatale (a woman who proves fatal for the protagonist whether she loves him or double-crosses him—or does both (though I don’t consider this a criterial feature of noirs, only a frequent one), and
(7) a cowardly but plenty dangerous bully,
(8) features nightclubs and
(9) fog (6-9 are recurrent but not defining features).
Movies are a collaborative art/craft, and the parentage of the American noir seems to me very mixed. There are no DNA tests to sort out genealogy of film genres, but it seems to me that “Quai de Brumes” and “Pépé le Moko” are noirs—and French films known to some in Hollywood (especially since ” Pépé le Moko” was remade, pretty much shot by shot, in 1938 as “Algiers” with the even more fatalistic Charles Boyer taking the role Gabin originated (both have poignant shots of a ship leaving without the protagonist who wanted/needed to be on it, and so does “Le quai des brumes”). And these Carné/Prévert films relate to the earlier Renoir films I’ve already mentioned (both in look, setting in “les bas-fonds,” and in personnel, plus one scripted by Prévert for Renoir, the black comedy “The Crime of M. Lange.” I might also note that Carné succeeded in keeping the unhappy ending in contrast to many Hollywood noirs with incongruous happy endings tacked on.
DVD
Given Criterion’s track record, I assume that they have used the best available print of each frame, though the best is not always very good. The sound is clear (mono), and the bonus features not extensive (there is another essay by Luc Sante that I (regretfully) have not seen; an original theatrical trailer, and quite an interesting and extensive gallery of production stills and quite an astounding range of French film posters (all but one of which list Simon above Morgan).
©2005, Stephen O. Murray
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