Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939)
(On Cable TV, November 2022) I don’t particularly care for Le Jour se lève, but I can certainly admire its craft and chosen genre—anyone who loves film noir can’t help but be fascinated by the French poetic realism subgenre that shares so much of its DNA. The premise is admirably tight: After killing a man, the protagonist locks himself in this apartment and flashes back to the romantic relationship worth killing over even as the police surround the apartment and plan on breaking through. With Marcel Carné directing, Jacques Prévert writing and Jean Gabin in the lead role, this is one of the big French films of the 1930s. The combination between romance and crime is still effective, and brings to mind many later films. Amazingly enough, Le jour se lève was long thought lost—a combination of the Nazi regime and RKO’s efforts to destroy all copies of the film as so not to compete with the American remake The Long Night ensured that the film disappeared for a few years, only to re-emerge in the 1950s. It would have been quite a loss.