Product Description

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, when acts of both revenge and kindness turn him into front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michèle Morgan in her first major role, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their own destinies. Based on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable team of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert deliver a quintessential example of poetic realism, one of the classics of the golden age of French cinema.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44947 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2004-07-20
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, Special Edition, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
On a foggy highway, a lonely soldier hitches a ride and ends up in a lonely bar on the outskirts of town, where lost souls gather for a melancholy repast. The soldier is Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserter on the run whose flight is interrupted when he meets sad runaway Nelly (Michele Morgan) and falls in love. He becomes entwined in the troubles of her life, notably the lascivious guardian (Michel Simon) who lusts after Nelly and attempts to blackmail Jean, and a cocky, hot-headed gangster (Pierre Brasseur) who tries to scare Jean off, only to be humiliated in front his men and the town. It's not hard to see where this spiral of threats and confrontations is leading (the title, after all, translates to "Port of Shadows," as ominous a title as any American film noir, especially in a small town where everyone's lives become tightly wound together. Director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert (who went on to collaborate on the French masterpiece Children of Paradise) infuse the film with a sense of dignity and quiet poetry. At night the port town is like a world in the clouds, cut off from the rest of the world, where all the sordid yearnings and desperate plans of the ambitious players take on a mythic resonance. It's only by light of day that everything returns to its shabby place. A classic of French poetic realism. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Cinematic Experience in a Foggy Atmosphere...
Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserting soldier, emerges out the darkness as an approaching truck's lights cut through the night. The truck driver offers Jean a ride which he gladly accepts as he is weary from his long journey away from his dark past in the French military, a past that Jean wants to escape as it brings him pain and anxiousness, which haunts his restless mind. Weariness and dreadful memories brings Jean into a foggy world where he drifts between sleep and awareness while the truck is traveling in the direction of the French port city of Le Havre, which is equally foggy and full of threats.

Hopeful, Jean arrives to Le Havre where he intends to find a new beginning to his life, and where he can discard his past. A port city offers several opportunities for a person such as Jean to embark on new journeys as the port is full of ships leaving each day for new destinations. Through the help of some strangers that Jean meets at a worn down tavern he begins to find a light, which could help guide him back on track to a new life. However, the fog remains as Jean's destiny has different plans for him as his good nature seems to affect the people he meets.

Port of Shadows is a poetic visualization of a realistic story, which Carne gave a magic touch to by using visual signs to enhance the cinematic experience. These signs have a symbolic value for the audience as it offers cerebral participation in the film, which can be pondered for some time. The symbolism of the fog and use of a port city has a profound effect on the films cinematic value as it may causes some cognitive dissonance as both coexist and could be associated with opposite notions. An example of this symbolic antagonism for the fog and the port is the freedom of a port and the barrier of the fog. An analogy can be drawn the antagonism between the fog and the port to Jean's ambiguous character who is good, yet capable of violence.

Port of Shadows is a powerful film based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan that does not leave anyone untouched regardless of background or creed. The story depicts elements of human ambiguity, crime, and love, which is elevated with brilliant cinematography and direction. The cinematography uses several close-ups and zoom-outs in order to bring the characters feelings to the audience, which enhances the visual experience of the excellent cast. In the end the audience will have experienced a most brilliant cinematic event.

Prime example of poetic realism
Very much akin to Visconti's Ossessione made a few years later, Le Quai Des Brumes is a typically French noirish portrayal of the underbelly of society, with superb Jean Gabin in the role of a disillusioned Foreign Legion deserter torn apart between fleeing the country for good and defending his romantic interest from a host of seedy underworld characters. Irresistibly fatalistic.

Poetic Coincidences?
An example of poetic realism, the French film movement (atmosphere would be more precise) between WWI and WWII, Port of Shadows is heavy on coincidence beginning, arguably, with the truck driver who transports Jean, the Jean Gabin character (and us) into the film. Jean hasn't eaten for two days and is given free food by an innkeeper; he meets a girl and the attraction is mutual; he needs new clothes and a passport so an artist commits suicide and leaves both to him, etc.

All of this would make for a predictable run-of-the-mill thing except for the fact that there is more than coincidence going on here and that the coincidences themselves are in many ways of little concern to the point of the film. Indeed, it seems that the filmmakers used coincidence as a way of dispensing with nettlesome plot necessities in order to focus more intently on what they wanted the film to convey. What it does convey, and quite nicely, is the sense of impending doom, a haunted past (Jean is a deserter who seems to harbor darker secrets in his past), the venality and corruptability of man, love gained and lost, and the futility of daily life when stacked against all of that. Hardly a sunny romp in the woods (somehow the fog seems to linger even in bright sunlight), but an entertaining film nonetheless.

Aside from the coincidences and the atmosphere, another interesting aspect is the way in which the Gabin character exits outside of society. A deserter (and one sense that he joined the army only a way to escape some former social unit), he has left behind that society in search of, not really another one, but perhaps a way to live outside any society at all, at least until he meets the girl. Ill-tempered, abrupt, pugnacious he is an anti-social individual whose wounds and attitudes seem to have been instilled by previous social encounters. He is about escape (and not just to South America on the freighter which is coincidently [there's that word again] departing soon, but only after affording him sufficient time to pursue the girl. His escapes are from the army, from France, from society, ultimaly from himself and, most likely, that past which rendered all escapes necessary in the first place.

He meets his end as a result of his entanglement with the woman (an attempt to re-enter society?) and as a result of a chivalrous act towards her. No femme fatale, she is innocent in the bringing about of his downfall, but brings it about nonetheless. Filled with a fog that could be fate, could be the haze of the past, or could be simply photogenic the film is an enjoyable example of French poetic realism, sort of like an American film noir without the suspense and without the scheming woman but with all of the sense of loss, unfulfilled (or only sporadically realized) desires and dark workings of fate characteristic of that genre. Suspend some of the expectations Hollywood films have created in most of us, spend some time here and you will be rewarded. You can call it a coincidence.