Sun 11 Feb 2018
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: PORT OF SHADOWS (1938).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[2] Comments
PORT OF SHADOWS. Les Films Osso, France, 1938. Original title: Le quai des brumes. Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan and Michel Simon. Screenplay by Jacques Prevert, from a novel by Pierre Dumarchais. Directed by Marcel Carné.
A dark, poetic film that looks forward to film noir and the later novels of David Goodis.
Jean Gabin, the French Bogart-before-there-was Bogart, plays an army deserter heading for Le Havre, looking to find a ship to flee the country. What he finds are a stray dog that adopts him on the highway into town, and a lot of have-nots willing to share their meager fortunes with him, and discourse Goodis-style on life, love and dreams.
Also hanging around town are a few local hoods in some kind of scrape with a shady store-keeper and his daughter (Michele Morgan, looking more radiant and lovelier here than in any of her American films) and it’s not long before Gabin and his mutt find themselves in the proverbial thick of things as he tries to understand the tangled relationships and get out of town.
I’ll say up front that this thing is awfully contrived; characters turn up in unlikely places with no more reason for being there than to move the plot along. But I’ll also say that Director Carné handles it so gracefully one doesn’t want to notice.
The small-time gangsters are evoked with just the right measure of terse absurdity, their put-on hard-boiled act melting away at Gabin’s genuine toughness, and the winos and poets fill in the background vividly, talking with that awesome redundancy one finds in dark artists like Woolrich, Goodis and Jim Thompson.
The outcome is as pleasingly phony as the rest of it, but I have to say Carné rings in a moving surprise at the very end. The final image of the little dog walking down a highway to nowhere in particular is one that will stay in my mind long after whole other movies are forgotten.
February 12th, 2018 at 2:57 am
You can date the influences all the way back to Griffith and THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY and forward through German Expressionism, Hollywood gangster pics (Warner’s particularly), to here, which gave birth and a name to Film Noir … it’s all very incestuous and self reverential and certainly gave birth to some great movies.
Gabin is always a favorite, from his youth as the brooding sexy every common Frenchman here and in films like GRAND ILLUSION to the stocky maturity of Maigret and Bardot and the aging godfather period of THE SICILIAN CLAN. His is one of the great faces in cinema, virtually a history of the French cinema from the thirties through the sixties.
This one is, as Dan so atmospherically evokes, a powerful almost dreamlike film yet deeply rooted in a sort of heightened realism. The tragic roots of inescapable fate that would become the keynote of American noir and then in turn influence French New Wave was born in films like this.
February 12th, 2018 at 5:11 am
This is a very good review. Thank you!
This film is at the center of a movement in French film called “poetic realism”. Its screenwriter Jacques Prévert was in fact a poet, as well as a screen storyteller.
Jean Gabin was seen in those class conscious days as archetypally “working class”.
The standard English title “Shadows” is a mis-translation. “Brume” means “mist, haze, or fog”. So “Port of Fogs” or “Port of Mists” would be more accurate. Unfortunately we are all stuck with “Port of Shadows”.
Dudley Andrew called his study of French poetic realism “Mists of Regret”.