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

The film was also very popular abroad, mainly in the United States, where Anatole
Litvak directed a remake of it under the title The Long Night (1947), starring Henry Fonda
(Joe Adams in the movie) in the Jean Gabin role, Elisha Cook Jr. as Joe’s blind neighbour,
and Barbara Bel Geddes making her debut as teenage orphan Jo Ann, Joe’s girlfriend. The
American ending is predictably a happy one though few would consider Henry Fonda’s
performance as convincing as Gabin’s lost soul floundering in self-pity. The film uses,
however, the same technique of flashback and presents the same narrative complexity to
expose the total despair of a post-traumatic stress war veteran whose circumstances and
problems in life can only add to his frustration whatever he tries to do.
Both of these films are impressive portraits of an angst-ridden culture, with the
imminence of the next World War. Jean Gabin, in turn, is not only capable of playing
ordinary working-class men but he does it with a great conviction (in the case of Le Jour se
Lève he certainly gains the audience’s sympathy). As Andrew Dickos notes, “The psychic
malaise written on the physiognomy of the great screen star Jean Gabin – romantic fatalism
at its signature best – expressed not fear and terror so much as existential resignation to the
perceived inexplicability of man’s longings, not terribly mutable through time and destiny”
(Dickos 2002:43).
There is a third film made between these two which also summons up Marcel
Carné’s pessimistic view of the world and which expresses an even stronger romantic
fatalism in the characters’ lives. Hôtel du Nord (1938) is its name and also the place where
two Parisian lovers Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) meet to put an end
to their negative and visionless future lives (fig. 24). The suicide pact fails and Pierre,
having merely wounded Renée, finds his courage fail too and he flees, giving himself up to
the police. A network of subplots leads the film into the heart of Parisian lowlife, with the
story of a pimp and the hotel owner, Monsieur Edmond (Louis Jouvet) and a good-hearted
prostitute, Raymonde (Arletty). Their dialogue of hopelessness is similar to the lovers’ one
upstairs in their bedroom. Raymonde turns to Edmond and shouts: “Ma vie n’est pas une
existence, si tu crois que mon existence est une vie” 32 mirroring her unconscious urge to
move away from her tenebrous life. The sets in French Poetic Realist cinema were
intended to have solidity, and to render a specific milieu and the ones in this film do
exactly that. The cramped rooms of the hotel alongside the Canal Saint-Martin give a
32 “My life is not an existence, if you think that my existence is a life” (my translation).
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