O Porto da Tentação

Robert Newton has been a railroad night signalman, stuck in a box for eight hours a night for twenty years. His wife died three years ago, and he's trying to raise their daughter, Margaret Barton. One night he sees two men get into a fight in the yards, and one of them goes down. Both disappear, but he recovers the suitcase they were fighting over. There are five thousand pounds in small bills in it. He takes it home, determined to take it to the police, but on his way, there are too many temptations: a five-pound smoking pipe.... well, easy enough to stick with his old one, but there are other temptations.

Can decency survive in a Film Noir world? Oh, easy enough for someone like Bogart, I suppose, who's sampled the world and found it wanting, or Robert Mitchum, who can barely open his eyes to see, let alone want. But what is a little man like Robert Newton to do? He seems to be unaware there is anything outside his poor, little world, until he finds his daughter scrubbing floors in a butcher shop, the butcher's wife shouting at her, and he realizes that with this money, she doesn't have to do that. She can have that new dress, they can go to the fair and see Simone Simon, the Atomic Mermaid, and maybe he can have her too....

There's something sleazy and slipshod about the best of British film noir that makes it much more compelling; there's an air of desperation about it, of little men slipping through the cracks that the relative richness of American noir never noticed, outside of a few like Gordon Wiles' THE GANGSTER. With supporting players like William Hartnell and Marcel Dalio, this one has it.

When signalman "Bert" (Robert Newton) sees some suspicious activity in the harbour one night he investigates only to find a corpse and a suitcase. On returning to his box to call the authorities, he notices that the case contains rather a large quantity of banknotes. Around £5,000! Now he is single-handedly trying to raise his daughter "Betty" (Margaret Barton) and has a few other issues to contend with, so he decides to keep the windfall and keep his head down. That might have seemed a good plan at the time, but soon people begin to spot the signs of his new found wealth and with police from both sides of the Channel as well as the original owners of the loot on his trail, things start to get distinctly dicey for him. On the plus side, though, he has made a new friend. "Camelia" (Simone Simon) is the only person in whom he's confided, but is she trustworthy? Is anyone? This features a solid cast of regulars like Irene Handl, Edward Rigby and the always reliable Kathleen Harrison as it quite menacingly develops into a story illustrating the dangers of following the green-eyed monster, however well intentioned at the start one may be, and at just how it can change people. Newton is very much in his element - he always did do the frantic and panicky characters well, and he does illicit a degree of sympathy as things close in on him. It packs quite a lot into ninety minutes, pretty much hits the ground running and is well worth a watch.

This is a typical bleak Georges Simenon almost documentary and very "noir" story of very simple and normal people that are cruelly played out by destiny to fatal ordeals. It's a very unusual and different kind of role for Robert Newton, who manages this difficult part with outstanding excellence. Simone Siomon is also remarkably good, while the ruffian William Hartnell brings all the trouble and gets the worst of it. The story is very reminding of "The Man who Watched Trains Go By", and Robert Newton's character is closely related with Claude Rains' in the later film (1952), that was in colour, but this is all in very black and white, and more in black and more dark than light. What embellishes the story is the beautiful music by Mischa Spoliansky, an oasis of comfort in the awful predicaments, and Margaret Barton as the daughter, the only sunshine in the film, but she never stops shining. The story and film is sad but somehow anyway filled with poetry, for the main feeling of the film is a deep human compassion with unwilling victims of the misfortunes of destiny.

For some reason this film has been unseen for more than 30years.Unshown on TV,unreleased on vhs or DVD.I saw it over 30years ago at the BFI South bank.It is a great film,finally now viewable on the BFI player.Great performance from a restrained Robert Newton,atmospheric photography and taut direction.This film deserves a DVD release so that we can watch it whenever we like,not have to wait whilst it is stuck in a vault.

"Temptation harbor" is actually the remake of Henri Decoin's " l'homme de Londres" (1943) one of the twenty or so movies produced by the German La Continentale in the French occupations days.

The American screenplay ,based on Georges Simenon 's book ,has undergone some changes : the hero is a widower whereas in the French movie he had a whole family ; Camelia was a prostitute (with a big heart) whereas she's a "mermaid" at the fair in Lance Comfort's work.

Gone are religion, the colleague in the signal box who mentioned the Bible and the difficulties for man to stay on the straight and narrow .

But the gist of the movie is the same ;both heroes ,with their man-next-door look (Robert Newton is an ideal successor to Fernand Ledoux ) , are haunted by the lure of gain but smitten with remorse ; if religion is absent in Comfort's effort, one attends "a tempest in a skull" a la Victor Hugo : the frames of mind in voice over ,and Robert Newton's face reflect an unbearable feeling of guit.

The character of Camelia was thoroughly rewritten and developed ; one should note that they reverse the countries : the action which took place in France in Simenon 's book and in the first movie is now situated in England: and Camelia is played by French actress Simone Simon who had already two masterpieces under her belt ("Renoir's "la bête humaine" and Tourneur's "cat people") , her character is French although she appears as a stateless person ,not really a femme fatale ,who dreams of a little home in her native land .

Decoin 's movie focused on the atmosphere ;Comfort's effort is more action with a good sense of rhythm and scenes full of contrasts (the opening scene is the fair ,and the hero's daughter and his new love get along very well (not the usual jealous cliché)) ; the scene in the shack by the sea where only the lighter shows the face is even superior to Decoin's .

Both Decoin's and Comfort's version sufficed ,although Bela Tarr's 3rd adaptation turned it into highbrow stuff in 2008.