Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

team of Jacques Prévert (an eminent artist, writer, poet and scriptwriter) and director
Marcel Carné. They produced seven films together, of which two are considered to be
decisive in the decline of the Popular Front and of the desperation felt at the ineluctability
of war : Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak, 1939).
Figure 22. Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows)
The former is based on a novel by Pierre MacOrlan and casts Jean Gabin (one of
the actors that came to represent the archetypal worker of prewar French society), Michel
Simon and Michèle Morgan. In the film, Gabin plays the role of the exhausted Jean, a
soldier who decides to desert from the French Army, rather hopelessly, and who has a
hatred for almost everything, mostly guns and explosions. When he arrives at the fogbound
city of Le Havre, he is offered the possibility of changing his identity and sailing on
one of the cargo ships at the port off to South America. Although the suggestion sounds
appealing, he feels unenthusiastic since he is in love with a very young girl called Nelly
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