Port of Shadows Reviews

It is not very often that a director get the opportunity to launch a whole new genre but that’s what happened with Marcel Carné. It was even more impressive when you take into account that it was Carné’s only 3rd directing effort. I’m pretty sure that the guy didn’t realize at the time that he would pretty create a new genre which would have a huge impact on the French cinema. This new style was called poetic-realism, a style which would become Carné’s trademark and he would keep for a while with ‘Hôtel du Nord’ and ‘Le jour se lève’, some 2 other major French classics. Anyway, with Carné as a director, Jacques Prévert as a writer, Jean Gabin as lead actor, Michèle Morgan as love interest, you can’t do much better than that for that time period. Basically, even though it takes place in a realistic social background (‘realism’), the dialogues and emotions rise above (‘poetic’) and even though it seems that everything was shot on location, it was in fact shot in studios creating some interesting and stylish canvas. This approach would be of course criticized and rejected later by the New Wave. To conclude, even though it is really old, I is still quite fascinating to behold and it is definitely worth a look.