La Marie du port (1950)
Directed by Marcel Carné

Film Review

A second wind - for two

In 1946, Jean Gabin's hasty decision to turn down the lead role in the most prestigious French film of the year, Les Portes de la nuit, would have major consequences for not only his own future career but also that of the film's director, Marcel Carné.  Encouraged by his real-life partner at the time, Marlène Dietrich, Gabin instead opted to star in Martin Roumagnac, a noir-style melodrama directed by Georges Lacombe.  The actor's hopes of an immediate comeback after WWII were dashed in the face of the most fierce critical onslaught he had ever known.  Coming after his failure to make it big in Hollywood a few years earlier Gabin would have had good reason to think that his career was in terminal decline.  The critical reaction to his next film Miroir (1947) was just as negative although what was more concerning was Gabin's inability to draw the large audiences he had regularly attracted in the previous decade.  There was no escaping the fact that the postwar Gabin was very different to what he had been in his glory days of the 1930s.  He looked older, appeared stiffer and tougher, and had acquired some off-putting authoritarian mannerisms as a result of his wartime experience in the French Marines.   He was still capable of playing the romantic lead - the success of Rene Clément's Oscar-winning Au-delà des grilles (1948) bore this out - but it was clear that by the late 1940s Jean Gabin needed to move into a very different groove if he was to have any future as a big name in French cinema.

Coincidentally, the same was true of Marcel Carné, the director who had contributed much to Gabin's pre-war success with his poetic realist masterpieces Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939).  In the mid-1940s, Carné was one of France's most highly esteemed filmmakers, but by the close of 1946 both the critics and the film industry had turned against him, so intensely hostile had been the reaction to his provocative and inordinately expensive Les Portes de la nuit.  In common with many directors who had chosen to remain in France during the Occupation, Carné had become tainted with the slur of collaboration, thanks to his brief stint with the German-run company Continental Films.  In 1946, the French people wanted to forget what they had experienced during the dark years under Nazi Occupation but Carné's grimly unpatriotic film, with its overt references to collaborators, kept alive the memories that the nation was eager to bury.   For the next three years, the man who had helmed two of the most acclaimed French films made during WWII - Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945) - was unable to get a single project off the ground.  Attempts to adapt Franz Kafka's The Castle and Voltaire's Candide came to nothing, and the one film that did make it into production, La Fleur de l'âge, was aborted after a few days' filming when the financial backers suddenly pulled out.  Carné desperately wanted to make Juliette ou la Clef des Songes, a film he had originally attempted (unsuccessfully) a few years earlier, but it was such an ambitious undertaking that it had little chance of seeing the light of day - until the independent producer Sacha Gordine stepped in.  Gordine was sold on the idea but considered it a highly risky venture.  He made a deal with Carné, promising to finance the film on condition that he first delivered a box office success with a much more modest budget.  This was a decisive moment in Carné's career and, as luck would have it, for Jean Gabin as well.

The film that Marcel Carné agreed to direct for Gordine was La Marie du port, an adaptation of a 1938 novel by Georges Simenon of the same title.  To maximise the chance of the film's success, Carné persuaded Gabin to take the lead role, confident that the actor was on the brink of a big comeback after his recent screen success (Clément's film) and triumph on the Paris stage in a critically acclaimed production of Henri Bernstein's play La Soif.  The film was hardly a runaway success (its audience of 2.7 million appears modest compared with the 6.7 million achieved by the year's biggest hit Nous irons à Paris) but, thanks to its modest production budget, it made enough money for Gordine to honour his pledge to allow Carné to realise his dream project, Juliette ou la Clef des Songes (which sadly proved to be somewhat less successful).  The challenge of making a relatively low budget film within a fairly quick production schedule was, however, highly beneficial for a director whose natural tendency for obsessive perfectionism and wild extravagance needed to be tamed if he was ever to regain the confidence of an increasingly profit-conscious film industry.  After the grandiose excesses of Carné's previous three films, the low-key La Marie du port came as something of a surprise to everyone - albeit one to which most critics responded favourably.

Metamorphosis

There's no doubt that La Marie du port is a comparatively minor entry in the filmographies of both Marcel Carné and Jean Gabin, but it is equally true that for both men it was an absolutely crucial film, allowing them to transition to what they would become in the second half of their respective careers.  For Gabin, now in his mid-forties (but looking somewhat older), the film gave him the opportunity to create a new screen persona that was drastically different from that of his prewar years but fitted perfectly with his tougher postwar physique and personality.  Gone was all trace of the heroic working class romantic hero - this was now a complete anachronism that had no place in 1950s France.  Instead, Gabin fashions himself as the epitome of the bourgeois patriarch, a man of means who appears in control not only of his own destiny but also that of lesser mortals who fall under his power - in short, a godfather figure.  (Indeed, it is the actor's gangster portrayals, in such films as Jacques Becker's classic Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), that are the most memorable in his later years).  La Marie du port's crowd-baiting 'gimmick' of romantically pairing the older Gabin with a much younger nubile ingénue would be repeated many times over the course of the following decade, other notable examples being Jean Renoir's French Cancan (1954) (with Françoise Arnoul) and Claude Autant-Lara's En cas de malheur (1955) (with Brigitte Bardot).

The change in Marcel Carné's cinema was no less dramatic than the transformation in Gabin's screen persona.  The poetic realism of the 1930s was gone, replaced by a commitment to a new form of authentic expression - psychological realism within the context of contemporary themes that were of greatest relevance to a post-WWII French cinema audience.  The humiliation of the capitulation at the start of the Second World War and the long period of Occupation that followed cast a long shadow over France, making it easy for the country to embrace the dramatic social and political changes that came after the war.  By the late 1940s, after a few years of gruelling austerity, France was entering a brave new era defined by ever-increasing individualism and materialistic self-interest.  Social cohesion was breaking down and, as it did so, the old illusions, the old romantic dreams, faded from view.  Released in February 1950, La Marie du port was perfectly suited to its time and with it Carné made a clear statement that he was back with a new kind of cinéma populiste - one that dealt not with people's dreams but with their practical concerns for the rapidly changing world they were now living in.

The darkly oppressive look and feel of Carné's great 1930s melodramas (which owed much to German expressionism of the previous decade) is almost entirely absent in La Marie du port, which makes much greater use of real location exteriors and has most of its action take place during the daylight hours.  It is only in the few night-time sequences - where the young lovers Marie and Marcel meet on a studio reconstruction of the Port-en-Bessin harbour (another marvel from the legendary designer Alexandre Trauner) that the film has any connection with Carné's poetic realist films, but in a way that is clearly intended to be cruelly ironic.  The apparent artificiality of the set is emphasised by the starkly expressionistic way in which it is lit and photographed, and this exposes the risibly artificial nature of the young lovers' romance as a dream without any substance.  As we see later in the film, Marcel's supposed romantic idealism is scarcely paper-thin and Marie is far more interested in social and material advancement than true love.  For the most part, La Marie de port conforms with the new realist style of French cinema that followed on from Italian neo-realism of the 1940s, a style that became quite commonplace in contemporary French film drama for a few years after the success of René Clément's Au-delà des grilles.  Combining social realism and melodrama, such films would often be situated in provincial settings and revolve around the everyday lives of ordinary working class people.  Other examples include Henri Calef's La Maison sous la mer (1947) and Marcello Pagliero's Un homme marche dans la ville (1949).  Carné's film benefits from extensive location filming in Cherbourg and the nearby smaller coastal town of Port-en-Bessin (undertaken by Henri Alekan, one of the era's most gifted cinematographers).  This not only lends the film a striking positive modernity but also a visual poetry that is of a very different kind to what we find in the director's earlier films - more wistful than tragic.

In accounting for La Marie du port's significant departure from Carné's previous films much has been made of the fact that it was the director's first film after he brought to an end his long and fruitful collaboration with the screenwriter Jacques Prévert.  There is no mention of Prévert in the film's credits and the writer himself denied having had any substantial input into the film, and yet Carné maintained that the script was predominantly Prévert's work.  The film's dialogue is in fact credited to another distinguished writer, the Dadist poet Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, his one and only feature film credit.  The truth was that Prévert did in fact do the lion's share of the work on the script but he was unable to take the credit as this risked him breaching the terms of an invalidity pension he was drawing at the time after he had suffered a serious accident which (he claimed) prevented him from undertaking paid work.  La Marie du port was Prévert's final collaboration with Carné, bringing to an end a turbulent but incredibly productive association that began almost fifteen years earlier with Carné's first feature, Jenny (1936).

Escape to captivity

Perhaps La Marie du port's most tangible point of contact with Carné's earlier films is the shared desire by each of the four protagonists to escape their present constraining existences and pursue their (obviously unrealistic) dreams elsewhere.  This is most apparent in the case of Marie, the younger sister who is trapped in a life of drudgery as a café waitress and wants nothing more than to flee to Paris and find herself a rich eligible bachelor.  A half-hearted love affair with a good-looking youth in her own neighbourhood (Marcel) is clearly not enough for her, even if he treats her to occasional gifts of expensive perfume (obtained at immense personal sacrifice to himself).  How she envies her older sister Odile, not knowing that that the latter is just as dissatisfied with her lot, having failed to realise her own dreams of escape with her rich boyfriend Henri.  Marie is the only character in the film who gets what she thinks she wants, selling herself so that she can move a few rungs up the social ladder.

Henri is, on the face of it, a man who has no need of dreams.  A successful entrepreneur, he has just about everything a man could want and has no difficulty attracting the fair sex.  And yet even he has a hankering after freedom.  Early in the film he is seen looking out through the window of Marie's café at a passing funeral procession.  From the street, framed by the window, he looks like an unhappy prisoner trapped behind bars.  It's an almost exact reproduction of a similar shot in Le Quai des brumes, with the same actor (Gabin) seen through a window beside Michèle Morgan.  In that earlier film, the shot stresses the fatalistic entrapment of the two characters, who are fated never to escape from their miserable predicament.  The virtually identical shot in La Marie du port assures us that Gabin, in his latest guise, is just as constrained by his narrow bourgeois mentality.  He is doomed - not to suffer a grisly premature death, but to live out the rest of days in the burdensome chains of matrimony as the respectable middleclass married man.  His dreams of escape are apparent when his gaze is drawn to scenes of a far-away island paradise in a screening of Murnau's Tabu in his own cinema.  His impulsive decision to buy a fishing boat says just as much.  Inevitably, Henri is fated to give up his dreams of being a free man as he surrenders to the prison of bourgeois conformity - a point that is eloquently expressed in a metaphorical shot towards the end of the film.  After the fateful telephone call that alerts the brasserie owner to the fact that Marie's life may be in danger, the camera fixes on the door of the phone cubicle as it slowly but inexorably closes.  By now, Henri's fate is set in stone.  There is no possibility of escape as he rushes towards the marital snare that has been laid for him by his cunning temptress.  His prison door is slowly but surely closing on him.

As for Marcel, the poor working class boy with an impoverished sot of a father, his romantic idealism is soon exposed as a hollow charade - first with a ludicrously feeble attempt at self-harm and then with the ease with which he allows himelf to be seduced by Odile (not that we can blame him given that Odile is played by such an alluring actress as Blanchette Brunoy).  The fact that this dreamy romantic with clay feet is named Marcel may be significant: could the director possibly be using the character to mock his earlier, more romantically inclined self?  It is tempting to liken Marcel with the principal character (played by Gérard Philipe) in Georges Lampin's L'Idiot (1946), a film that is directly referenced in La Marie du port and (tellingly) ridiculed by Gabin's character.  Underlying Marcel's apparent naivety are unattractive qualities (selfishness, vindictiveness, impetuosity) that set him well apart from the young romantics of Carné's early films and place him among the wilder youths of the director's later films - Les Tricheurs (1959), Terrain vague (1960), Les Jeunes loups (1968).  Interestingly, the actor that Carné chose for the role was Claude Romain, who was to have had his screen debut in the director's previous (abandoned) La Fleur de l'âge.  Romain appeared in just three films after this, his last screen credit being in Georges Lacombe's La Lumière d'en face (1955).  En passant, it is worth mentioning two other notable names in the cast list - Julien Carette, a popular supporting actor favoured by Jean Renoir (La Règle du jeu) and Claude Autant-Lara (L'Auberge rouge), and Jane Marken who, as a café owner, appears in a role virtually identical to the one she had played in Carné's Hôtel du nord (1938).

Whilst none of the four main characters is particularly sympathetic, the film tacitly avoids casting judgement on them.  This is a feature of all of Carné's postwar films, which adopt an even greater degree of objectivity and detachment than we find in his earlier work.  This runs counter to the trend in French cinema of the period 1946 to 1955 in which female protagonists are often shown in a negative light (a hangover of the prevailing chauvinistic view that during the Occupation most of the collaborators had been women).  Consider for example, Julien Duvivier's Voici le temps des assassins (1956), which has a similar plot to La Marie du port except that the lead female character (played by Danièle Delorme) is presented as a heartless monster driven by greedy self-interest.  By contrast, Marie in Carné's film is a much more ambiguous and engaging character, which is due in part to a remarkably nuanced performance from Nicole Courcel (excelling in what was only her second screen role, following her debut in Jacques Becker's Rendez-vous de juillet (1949)).  In one key scene, where Henri is struggling to get inside the girl's head, Marie's implacable face is captured in a massive close-up that shows us nothing about the character's true nature.  Only in a few brief shots does the character betray her intention of hooking Henri and forcing him into a marriage that will allow her to realise her ambitions.  For the most part, Marie appears as Henri sees her - a beguiling enigma, the most inscrutable and irresistible of honey traps.

How right Henri is when he quips (in jest) that Marie is a siren.  Once he has fallen under her spell (which happens within a few seconds of their first meeting), he is a man trapped for life.  Equally apt is the girl's description as sournoise, someone who hides her thoughts and true feelings, a quality that leads Henri to rap his knuckles on her forehead as if in a desperate attempt to get at what is in her head.  It is possible to view Marie as a scheming opportunist (like Delorme's brazenly evil character in Duvivier's film), skilfully manipulating an older man into marrying her so that she can secure a better life for herself.  But we can also see her as a shining example of the modern liberated woman, one who uses the one asset she has - her obvious sex appeal - so that she can move up the social hierarchy.  In her determination and assertiveness, Marie bears some resemblance to Simone Signoret's character in the director's subsequent Thérèse Raquin (1953).   She may not be the kind of 'perfect being' that Carné was fixated on in his 1930s films, but neither is she in any sense a villain.  In fact, by the end of the film we know her well enough to realise that the apparent triumph she shows in the closing shot will be short-lived.  For an idea of what her future prospects hold we have only to watch Carné's next contemporary realist drama L'Air de Paris (1954), which presents the unvarnished truth of married life with Gabin grumpily saddled with a doormat wife he habitually neglects and abuses.

Always look on the dark side of life

The crushing pessimism of Carné's prewar films lies in the fact that his characters are manifestly unable to escape their tragic destinies - not because they are weak or ineffectual but because their lives are governed by powerful external forces that are beyond their control.  The director's postwar films offer another kind of pessimism that reflects the experience of ordinary people living in a less superstitious, far less ideologically driven age.  Here, his characters may have greater freedom but this freedom does not guarantee happiness.  On the contrary, it is just another way in which misery can be self-inflicted, through freely made choices that do not have the expected or desired outcomes.  In contast to Carné's work of the 1930s, his later films appear to be more in line with the existentialist notion that men (and women) are condemned not by the Fates but by their own wilfully driven actions.  'If we are unhappy it is because we choose to be unhappy' is one interpretation of Sartrean freedom  Whatever its origins, there's no mistaking the deep stream of pessimism that runs through practically all of Carné's work.  The grasping for the unattainable is what appears to motivate most of his protagonists - the inevitable fate of beings of unbounded imagination that are forced to inhabit a world of finite possibilities.  The truth of this would hit the director incredibly hard as he embarked on his next ambitious film project - the brilliant but tragically ill-received Juliette ou la Clef des Songes.

Film Synopsis

In 1949, Odile le Flem, a woman in her mid-thirties, makes a reluctant return to the small Normandy town where she grew up, Port-en-Bessin, to attend the funeral of her recently deceased father.  She is accompanied by her boyfriend Henri Chatelard, a successful entrepreneur who is ten years her senior.  Henri runs a thriving brasserie with an adjoining cinema in the nearby town of Cherbourg and he always has an eye open for other business opportunities.  He takes advantage of Odile's absence to attend the auction of a fishing boat which its present owner, Thomas Viau, has been forced to sell after stumbling into financial difficulties.  Once he has purchased the boat, Henri allows his attention to stray in the direction of Odile's pretty younger sister Marie, who resents working for her keep in a harbourside café and dreams of living the high life in Paris.

Henri's relationship with Odile has been on the wane for several months and so the prospect of a new love affair with the younger sister is one he finds hard to resist.  It doesn't take Marie long to realise that she has a new amorous admirer, one who offers her a far more attractive future than her present boyfriend, Marcel.  He is a mere hairdresser's assistant, and being the son of the impoverished fisherman Thomas Viau, he is unlikely ever to provide the kind of life Marie envisages her herself.  When he discovers that his beloved Marie intends to dump him so that she can start an affair with a much older man Marcel is devastated.  One night, he stands in the road in front of a coming car and only just escapes serious injury.  As luck would have it, the man driving the car is his rival, who wastes no time taking the distraught youngster back to his home in Cherbourg to recover from his minor injuries.

Marie is naturally delighted when Henri rings her up to tell her what has happened.  She now has a perfect excuse to call on her prospective sugar daddy and lure him into marrying her.  The meeting does not go as she planned, however.  Uncertain over Marie's motives, Henri loses his temper with her and drags her up to Marcel's room - only to find the supposedly injured young man in bed with Odile!  Sickened by this turn of events, Marie rushes off in a fit of pique.  Not long afterwards, Henri receives a telephone call alerting him to the fact that the young woman looks as if she may be contemplating killing herself.  In a panic, the businessman hurries after Marie and, having caught up with her, he offers the calculating young woman exactly what she wanted all along - the keys to his brasserie and a definite proposal of marriage.  Marie's victory appears to be complete.