The director of the film, Jean Epstein said he chose to film a simple story of love and violence "to win the confidence of those, still so numerous, who believe that only the lowest melodrama can interest the public", and also in the hope of creating "a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence of tragedy."
The script was written in one night.
Jean Epstein had been very impressed by Abel Gance's film La Roue (The Wheel), and in Coeur Fidele (Faithful Heart) he also used rhythmic editing, overlays, close-ups, and point-of-view shots.
Jean Epstein began his career as a literary and film critic. He claimed that "sight is the most developed sense and that cinema constitutes a new system of consciousness." He saw cinema as a unique medium combining art and science, thought and feeling, motion and light. "Life isn't a linear narrative. It is a series of situations that might lead anywhere. What matters in cinema as in life, are the small movements and moments that comprise our continuous movement through time, frame by frame or day by day," Epstein wrote.
The images showing massive ships and the gloomy, deserted docks of Marseilles are an early representation of poetic realism. Poetic realist films recreated realism rather than trying to show the actual spaces depicted in documentary films. They were highly stylized and usually filmed completely in studios. These films usually had a fatalistic view of life with their characters living on the margins of society, either as unemployed members of the working class or criminals. After a life of disappointment, the characters get a last chance at love but are ultimately disappointed again and the films frequently end with disillusionment or death. The overall tone often resembles nostalgia and bitterness. They are "poetic" because of a heightened aestheticism that sometimes draws attention to the representational aspects of the films.