The shop received a quintet of titles from France today that consists of one new addition to the shop’s inventory, Marcel Carné’s “Le Jour Se Lève,” and four restocks. The restocks were Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” Luis Buñuel’s “Fever Mounts at El Pao,” “The Trial” by Orson Welles, and “Beowulf 3D” by Robert Zemeckis.
After teaming for “Port of Shadows,” director Marcel Carné, screenwriter Jacques Prevert, and star Jean Gabin got together for another masterpiece of poetic realism, “Le Jour Se Lève” (aka “Daybreak”). As was commonly the case at this stage of his career, Gabin plays the doomed idealist, a worker at a toxic factory that he knows will eventually kill him. In some ways, though, the film was unlike anything French audiences had ever seen: it employed a flashback structure cribbed from an earlier American movie that was unprecedented in French film and it also contained a shot of French actress Arletty emerging from the shower topless, a level of onscreen nudity by a female star that hadn’t been seen in French cinema at that point.
The film is also significant as the end of the phase in Gabin’s career where he was the face of poetic realism. While the style continued on (and, some say, reached its apex in Carné and Prevert’s 1945 film “Children of Paradise”), his path would take him elsewhere: first to Hollywood, then to North Africa, where he served under de Gaulle in WWII. After the war Gabin’s career would continue to flounder for almost another decade, when his role as the seasoned gangster Max in “Touchez pas au grisbi” initiated the next great phase of his career: as veteran gangsters, hitmen, and police inspectors in films like “Crime and Punishment,” “The Night Affair,” “Any Number Can Win,” and “The Sicilian Clan.”