El día se levanta

Carne and Prevert on a roll; hot on the heels of 'Quai des Brumes' comes this, next up will be Les Visiteurs du Soir' and THAT will be followed by 'Les Enfants du Paradis'. Get out of that, John Ford/Dudley Nichols. Where do you start with something like this, someone send a Runner for a new set of superlatives. Start with the heavy? Jules Berry, they don't come any oilier, he'd already scored in a previous Prevert script, 'Le Crime du Monsieur Lange' with Renoir on bullhorn and he used this as a warm-up for his Satan in 'Visiteurs'. Arletty? Garance-in-Waiting, 'Hotel du Nord' behind her, 'Visiteurs/Enfants' to follow. Gabin? What can I say. Even Nat Cole didn't have a trio like this. To quote the title of an earlier (1935) Gabin vehicle this was truly La Belle Equipe. How Hollywood could cast Hank Fonda in the Gabin role is beyond me. Hank, 'aw shucks' Fonda, niceness personified as decent but RUGGED Gabin? Come on, already. Vincent Price plays Jules Berry? Get real! Sandy Trauner's brilliant apartment building sets the tone here from frame #1. What an opening, Jules Berry exiting Gabin's room and running out of breath. Crowd assembling. Nowhere-To-Go Gabin holed up in his 10 by 6 reminiscing in Gitane time. Never had a chance, life's a bitch and then you die. Basically that's all there is to it. But, as someone once said, it's the way you tell them. Brilliant in spades.

We see a man shot; who he is and why we don't know. The murderer has locked himself inside his room. Police are forced to shoot in, trying to get him to surrender. The story then proceeds in flashback.

Marcel Carné directs this famous French film starring Jean Gabin. The two had worked together the previous year on "Le quai des brumes", a film well known then and now. If you are unfamiliar with Gabin, he was to the late 1930's in France what Bogey would be shortly in America, only Bogey with a soupçon of Cagney. More animated than Bogart, but less than Cagney with his agile song-and-dance-man side. A tough guy who's actually a good guy.

Now, a soft-hearted tough guy who's surrounded by police -- that could also describe Bogart's breakthrough film, "High Sierra", from 1941, and perhaps there is some superficial similarity.

However, this story is mostly a tale of love affairs and working class life -- that's really where its interest lies. There's a real sympathy here for the common man, when even a modest house on a rutted street would seem beyond his reach.

This film's original reputation may have been based at least in part on its Gallic openness about sexual matters. It's quite outré by the Anglo-Saxon standards of 1939. Regardless, the justly celebrated "Le jour se lève" has a poetic quality overall, and a memorably ironic final shot of the kind we don't seem to see quite often enough anymore.

French cinema at its best. Ideas of freedom, entrapment, isolation and realism wound into a great film which is carried by Gabin from the opening scene of the murder, through flashbacks he has remembered to the amazingly brutal final shot. Gabin and Laurent in the factory near the beginning of the movie is poetic realism at its most involving.

sentimental, far to be great, almost common. but seductive under the science of Carne to give delicate nuances to flash backs, to transform scenes in little gems. and, in same measure, the art of Prevert to transform each detail in a precise piece of puzzle. a film about love and innocence. about a kind of Mephisto - remarkable performance of Berry - and delicate lights of role in Jacqueline Laurent performance. but, in many aspects, a film of Arletty and Jean Gabin. not a surprise. the names of director and scriptwriter are basic guarantees for a remarkable work. but, after so many years, like many other films," Le jour se leve" has more seductive sparkles and great profound value.

Thing that this movie is best known and appreciated for is its unique way of storytelling. It's one of the very first movies that features a story that gets mostly told with flashbacks and it keeps switching back between past and present. This storytelling technique was later made more famous and popular by Orson Welles with his masterpiece "Citizen Kane".

But of course a movie requires a bit more than just some good storytelling, though it still remains a very important aspect. But this movie also has a great, quite simplistic movie, with still a lot happening in it, like only the French could make. It's a bit of a sweet love-story, that shows the events leading up to a fatal shooting. Some people will call this movie slow but hey, that was just the way movies were back in its days. But it's not like it's slow pace ever makes the movie a boring or dragging one, or at least not to me. It might had been the case if the movie had been a bit longer but with its running time around 90 minutes, it's simply a short movie to watch.

It's also one beautiful looking movie, that features some great cinematography and especially lighting. Shadows play in important part in the movie its visual look. Amazing thing about its cinematography is that the movie actually had 4 different cinematographers attached to it. No idea what the story is behind this but I guess that each used their own specialty for this movie, or some of them simply got fired or stepped up during production. Anyway, whatever was the case, it really didn't hurt the movie its visual look. Marcel Carné movies often were visually a real pleasure to watch and this movie forms no exception on this.

It's also a movie that quite heavily relies on its actors to tell its story and to deliver its great dialog, that got specially written by poet scenarist and songwriter Jacques Prévert. And this movie luckily had some great actors to work with. At the time Jean Gabin really was one of the best French actors. He really did his best work in the '30's and starred in some other classics such as "Pépé le Moko" and "La grande illusion" during the same decade.

Some great and unique storytelling equals a great and unique movie.

9/10

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