Le Quai Des Brumes


DVD Review: Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)

Fans of film should be thankful for Marcel Carné. If he’s slipped off your radar, you should know that he was one of the most revered helmsmen of pre-war cinema. Gathering together a talented bunch of actors, designers and scribes, Carné set about injecting a dose of gritty realism into French film-making. He’s even credited with the mainstream idea of ‘poetic realism,’ which takes the hopes of those who aspire to something better, and grinds them under a muddy footprint. It’s a theme that will be familiar to fans of film noir, not to mention a certain movie set in a certain Moroccan city.

Le Quai Des Brumes (The Port Of Shadows) was Carné’s third film as a director, and his first with Jean Gabin as his leading man. Gabin plays Jean, a deserter from the French Army, who finds his way to the seedy port of Le Havre looking for a quick exit on one of the ships. The titular port town is a place for those looking to either lose themselves or escape. Jean finds himself mixed up in some pretty shady business before too long.

Much of this business is linked to seventeen-year old Nelly (Michèle Morgan), who finds a place in her heart for the military man, while fending off the lecherous advances of her sleazy godfather, Zabel (Michel Simon). Nelly is clearly a girl in demand – walking the cobbles in a see-through mac, she has already turned the head of local gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur). A large part of the movie is devoted to Jean’s battle between doing what his head says, and what his heart makes him do.

Rightly lauded as a fore-runner of the noir genre, Le Quai Des Brumes is a gem unearthed by Optimum. The print’s been cleaned up from earlier transfers, and because of this the use of shadow and light, especially in the long shots, looks stunning. Le Havre is by turns seedy and welcoming, which for a mainly studio-filmed story is nothing short of a miracle.

The film is driven by the obvious sexual chemistry between the then 34 year old Gabin and his leading lady Morgan, eighteen at the time. At a time when Hollywood was stifled by the Hays code, Jean and Nelly share passionate kisses and wake up together the morning after. Equally convincing is the sleazy Zabel, the man nobody likes but has to suffer. He’s the black heart beneath the harbour in more ways than one.

There are complaints, or course. Brasseur is over-the-top even for the times, and removes any menace he’s supposed to convey, and let’s just say fight scenes aren’t Carné’s forte. Another charge levelled at Le Quai Des Brumes is that you can see the plot coming together a mile away, and it’s riddled with clichés of the noir genre (smouldering leading lady, ugly villains, portentous music). However, Carné and his team were bringing these conventions to the screen well before anyone else thought of nicking them.


It’s worth watching Le Quai Des Brumes as a mood-piece as much as anything else. The cinematography is truly stunning for the time, Gabin laconically deflates any pretensions that creep into the dialogue, and even if you see the ending coming, it’s arguably more powerful shot by Carné in the fog of the harbour than in any expensively filmed scene today. A classic, and for good reason.

Chris Stanley

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"We Don't Want to Give Anybody Sleepless Nights": Revisiting 'Ghostwatch'

Image
Lights explode and the studio is plunged into demonic darkness. The souls manning the telephone lines have long since vanished, leaving only  Mike Smith ’s panicked requests after his wife's welfare. Papers whip across the screen, caught in a maelstrom of malevolence. Watches attached to wrists hundreds of miles away have come to a dead stop, and there have been multiple reports of inanimate objects tearing themselves from surfaces and throwing themselves across rooms all across the land. The people of Great Britain watch entranced as Michael Parkinson , controlled by some force that earlier in the evening he’d foolishly dismissed, sleepwalks beyond the camera’s lens, muttering a nursery rhyme. Yes, the BBC has paid heavily for messing with the supernatural alright, and on Hallowe’en , of all nights. Samhain ; the night the divide between the living and the dead is gossamer thin. Sarah Greene has passed through a doorway of her own, until this night just a cupboard beneath the sta
Read more

My Christmas Presents, 1991-99

Image
With it being Christmas Day tomorrow, and with the two years we’ve all had, nostalgia might well be the key ingredient gracing the dinner table in people’s houses. Christmas is a time for creating memories, good or bad, and you can guarantee that whatever the weather there will be smiles, tears, arguments and people going over the top about that Nando’s gift set which will be next seen in the window of the local Blue Cross . After having a lovely memory of Christmas 1990 published in Museum Of Jerseys , it dusted off a few memories of the next few Yuletides, and so I thought I’d put all my nineties Christmases together to see if there was a thread - a Christmas ribbon, if you will. If you won’t, well, sod you - you’re the one reading when you ought to be wrapping. Enjoy! 1991 - Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Action Figures I think I grew up in the Golden Age of action figures. At the age of ten I had caught the tail-end of Star Wars merchandising, which was such a big money-spinner
Read more

Mad As Hell

Image
So, welcome back to my world. It’s debatable whether or not it’s better than the real world, but trust me, I wouldn’t have voted for him, so there’s that. People use the phrase “in a perfect world”, but it seems like 2016 was fuckin’ Nirvana compared to the shitshow this year is looking to be. Naturally, I’m back online to spread a little sunshine on proceedings, because my Smiths blog went really well (sample review: ‘you’re talking shit’). There are people better qualified and give a toss more than me about international politics. The Falklands Conflict was memorably described by Jorge Luis Borges as being “like two bald men fighting over a comb”, and the world has become a more spiteful and petulant place since the chilliest days of the Cold War. All I can say is that historically you don’t know you’ve lived through a crisis until you see it on a documentary. I watched some Channel 5 thing about 1990 the other day; turns out it was full of barricades, resignations and civil d
Read more