Directed by Marcel Carné • 1939 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty
One of the defining works of 1930s poetic-realist cinema, the fourth collaboration between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert is a gripping story of obsessive sexuality and murder starring the great Jean Gabin as an honest laborer who resorts to killing in order to free the woman he loves from the controlling influence of another man. Unfolding through flashbacks that bristle with a sense of inexorable doom, LE JOUR SE LÈVE (a.k.a. DAYBREAK) is a searing working-class tragedy that anticipates the dark themes and shadow-laden visual style that would come to be known as film noir.
Up Next in Season 1
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Zéro de conduite
Directed by Jean Vigo • 1933 • France
Starring Jean Dasté, Gérard de Bédarieux, Louis LefebvreSo effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema’s great acts of...
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Mother Hummingbird
Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1929 • France
Starring Maria Jacobini, Francis Lederer, Jean DaxStylishly mobile camerawork animates this elegant late-silent melodrama from Julien Duvivier, one of the leading lights of French poetic realism, in which a wealthy baroness (beautifully played by Mari...
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Les portes de la nuit
Directed by Marcel Carné • 1946 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Pierre Brasseur, Serge ReggianiThe last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shor...
