Laemmle Theatres and Rialto Pictures present Marcel Carné’s 1938 masterpiece, Port of Shadows, starring the charismatic Jean Gabin and the beautiful Michele Morgan, in a new DCP restoration featuring an all-new translation and subtitles.
Grade: A (***** out of *****)
Seminal actor Gabin plays Jean, a deserter from the Colonial Army, who arrives in Le Havre searching for a place to keep a low profile. He certainly doesn’t expect to get involved in the dispute between local “tough” guy Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) and the bearded shop owner Zabel (Michel Simon).
Nor does Jean expect to fall in love with Nelly (Michèle Morgan), a mysterious and alluring teenager.
In need of a new life and haunted by his past, Jean wants to disappear. But can he (or anyne) vanish? Does he really want to? And where to?
Port f Shadows will run at Film Forum from Friday, Jan 9 through Jan 15 in a brand new 4K restoration from Studiocanal and the Cinémathèque Française.
Praised as one of Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s greatest achievements and a highlight of French poetic realism, Port of Shadows is an exhilarating thriller, am existential noirish exploration of the ambiguous zone between past and future, life and death, and the impossibility of escaping the past, all quintessential themes of film noir as a distinct genre.
Prévert’s script about the lives of outcasts is by turns tough, poetic, lyrical, navigating between these divergent tones, and so does Carne’s spectacular direction, which at the time was innovative and even revolutionary.
“Port of Shadows” (a great, accurate title), which was made just before WWII and a year before Jean Renoir’s classic “Rules of the Game,” represents one of the finest films not just in French but also in world cinema.
The scholar Dudley Andrew has poignantly observed: “With its opening scene of bedraggled Jean Gabin struggling down a foggy road, the very temperament of French cinema changed.”
But it’s not only the opening sequence—the entire film is imbued with dark, mysterious, and seductive images that linger in memory long after the viewing experience is over.
The collaboration of Marcel Carne and Jacques Pervert will produce another world cinema masterpiece, Children of Paradise, in 1945.
Credits:
Directed by Marcel Carné
Screenplay by Jacques Prévert
Based on the novel Le Quai des brumes (1927) by Pierre Mac Orlan
Producer: Gregor Rabinovitch
Editing: René Le Hénaff
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Original music: Maurice Jaubert
Costumes: Coco Chanel
Starring Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan and Michel Simon
France | Approx. 91 min. | New 4K Restoration
Rialto Pictures
