Port du désir

In spite of the title (harbor of desire) this is not really an erotic movie,although sequences take place in a brothel,with saucy lines for the time;and which is even bolder,the two young leads sleep together the night when they meet.

These are the only daring touches of a conventional work:the screenplay involves elements of melodrama -the young orphan maid searching her sister in the low dives ,the old seadog whose wife left and whose daughter became a whore,etc-,and film noir( smuggling,a dead body in a wreck).But the movie loses on both counts,because of the poor directing.

Cast includes Jean Gabin in a routine part,Andrée Debar and her almost "male" face -which was successfully used by Jacqueline Audry in "la garçonne" and "le secret du chevalier d'Eon" and Henri Vidal who sadly,was to die of a heart attack four years later.

The sleazy atmosphere of Marseille is here, as well as our usual characters: noble Gabin, despicable Mr. Black, an innocent blonde in hardship and a "Lola". What's amazing is how things have changed since then in technique and social mores. From the way people have fun to what is "too much" in a film. This one must have been daring for its time (sex out of wedlock *on the first night, the dancing scene of Edith Georges (!) almost naked, women couples dancing).

Unpredictable like few films of the genre, it nevertheless gives us something to cling on, as we expect from the 50's, probably a more optimistic era than ours. Even the "body" is scarcely shown, some blonde hair almost poetically dangling from a window. By the way, the 2 scuba scenes must have looked fantastic on cinema! They're still impressive now, by their naiveté as well as for the primitive equipment they used :).

Baba makes a surprising secondary character, Madame Aimée is really "bad seed that refuses to die" (the line a prostitute dedicates to her near the end!), even minor characters like "Rossignol" are fine (and the fact he was sent for by the trade union teaches us a lesson on public vs. private business, in France but applicable elsewhere :)! "Andrée Debar was a very strange actress" as dbdumonteil writes so well on IMDb.

Michel is a bit too naive to be part of this underworld, that's not only about gangsters who can't shoot all the time. Lola and the other hookers are believable, if a bit too pretty for such a lousy brothel. Mr Léon (Berval) has the funniest quip: "I am but a honest smuggler"... who hates violence. Joseph Kosma's climax music is still (very) effective.

The ending is worth the whole film.

Near Marseilles, the ship sank,carrying with it contraband cigarettes and the corpse of a murdered girl. At first it was not a problem, but it has moved, and so the port authorities have hired Jean Gabin to refloat it. He has hired Henri Vidal to do the diving. But the sister of the dead girl, Andrée Debar, is in town looking for her sister, and the owner of the ship, Jean-Roger Caussimon, doesn't want the corpse or the cigarettes found.

Director Edmond T. Gréville has constructed a very 1930s-style movie, but in the post-war years, the easy corruption of the portside society has a different feel to it, mildly disapproving -- and murder, of course, remains a big no-no, even if to Caussimon it seems no more than part of his business. There's no magical realism, no divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. There's just money, sex, and chance no matter how honest or corrupt one is.