French cinema in the 1930s is particularly associated with the iconic figure of star Jean Gabin and the Poetic Realist films made later in the decade. The origin of these films can be traced back to the confusion produced by the introduction of talkies in 1929. At that time, French filmmaking was known principally for its visual and formal innovation. The guiding principle of its outstanding films was the Romantic idea of the artist-author as a talented genius. In Paris, the largely Surrealist-inspired avant-garde created a climate in which the narrative norms of Hollywood did not hold sway. At first, the French industry took protectionist measures, believing that synchronized dialogue would make English-speaking Hollywood uncompetitive. However, the two once-dominant French studios, Pathé and Gaumont, had become weak conglomerates, in no position to exploit the situation with an economic depression now in full swing. When in 1930 a US-German cartel deal was struck, Paramount was quick to equip its Joinville studio to crank out ‘canned theatre’-French-language copies of Hollywood successes.
Among the first to film in sound was René Clair. His fluid use of sound and image made the silent to sound transition look easy. Clair filled his elaborate, hugely successful films with images that mask or comment diagonally on the sound source, and song sequences that could be mimed. The prestige productions ‘Sous les toits de Paris’, ‘Le million’, ‘A nous la liberté’ and ‘Quatorze Juillet’ are light-hearted films that create an imaginary old Paris of great charm, which fed French audiences’ hunger for fun-filled nostalgia and brought Clair international fame.
With approximately 4.000 mostly individually owned, cinemas to re-equip at great expense, France took longer to convert to sound than the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain, and French cinema owners were vulnerable to Hollywood distributors’ exclusive deals. Soon, a quarter of films shown in French either originated from or had been made abroad. Caught in a vice between Hollywood and Germany’s principal film studio UFA, French producers had to invent, at speed a new national cinema with popular appeal. Their solution was to import theatre and vaudeville stars, and the playwrights and directors with whom they worked, and make farces, melodrama and military comedies that had the advantage of already being well-loved as plays. By the second half of the decade, a mere ten jobbing directors were responsible for more than a quarter of the French films released from 1936 to 1938. Even more than directorial influence, it was the personae of comic singers Fernandel, Georges Milton and Charles-Joseph Bach’ Pasquier, of popular actors including Raimu, Arletty, Harry Baur, Jules Berry, Michel Simon, and Louis Jouvet, and of young actresses such as Michèle Morgan and Annabella that set the tone of French cinema.
Playwright Marcel Pagnol was an early convert and in 1934 built his studio in his home city of Marseilles. Initially he wrote screenplays of his stage hits, although he did both write and direct the final part of his Marseilles trilogy. ‘César’, which capitalized on the success of his play ‘Marius‘. The best films he directed were derived from the novels of Jean Giono and were at least partly shot on location, a radical move at the time Pagnol even built the village of Aubignane for ‘Regain’.
Sacha Guitry, an equally famous dramatist, had written some silent shorts in the 1920s but it was in 1936 when he conceived his form of ‘filmed theatre’ that his career as a director took off. From then on he made light, humorous films starring himself and featuring taut dialogue, such as ‘Le roman d’un tricheur’, ‘Faisons un reve’, ‘Désiré’ and ‘Quadrille’.
Jean Vigo was more of a cinephile maverick. He made highly personal films, such as his documentary ‘A propos de Nice’ that depicts a city haunted by images of death. Shot while he was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him, his ‘Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collége‘ is a satirical portrait of a boarding school, and was banned. Neither film lasts an hour, but Vigo made one feature, ‘L’Atalante’, which depicts the honeymoon of a newly wed couple on a barge and became a landmark in cinema by establishing the Poetic Realism school.
Vigo was already dead and Guitry’s film career hardly begun when French cinema hit a mid-decade low. Pathe and Gaumont almost collapsed and Paramount’s French production activities were wound up Overnight, French production became a unreliable cottage industry, even more dependent on co-productions. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 did not stop, for instance, the anti-Fascist Jean Grémillon whose flop ‘la petite Lise’ was arguably a forerunner of Poetic Realism-from working in Berlin.
In fact with a few exceptions, French cinema in the 1930s largely ignored the political struggles that broke out on the streets of Paris with the Fascist riots of February 1934 and the happier Bastille Day demonstration in 1935 that cemented the socialist Popular Front alliance.
Hitler’s racist policies saw the German industry lose much of the native talent that had produced its recent flowering with films such as ‘Die 3-Groschen Oper’ by G. W. Pabst, ‘M’ by Fritz Lang, and ‘Liebelei’ by Max Ophüls. Many of the best German directors including Pabst. Lang. Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, and Billy, Wilder had émigré visits in France, which may have been crucial to French cinema’s upturn in quality from the middle of the decade onwards. German cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan and Curt Courant, in particular, helped Marcel Carné move cinema into the shadowy streets.
The Poetic Realist school of gritty nocturnal dramas of doomed romance set in a working-class background that perhaps began with ‘La petite Lise’, developed by Belgian born Pierre Chenal in ‘La rue sans nom’. However, it was another Belgian born director, veteran Jacques Feyder, assisted by Carné, who first set the new standard of quality in ‘Le grand jeu’, a romantic drama about a man who joins the French Foreign Legion and becomes obsessed with a woman who looks identical to the girl he left behind.
Actor Jean Gabin came to represent the tragic face of Poetic Realism. He first found fame in three films by Julien Duvivier. In ‘La bandera’, Gabin plays a murderer who joins the Spanish Foreign Legion. In ‘La belle équipe’ he is in a cartel of unemployed workers who buy a winning lottery ticket and open a restaurant together with uneasy results. In ‘Pépé le Moko’, Gabin plays a gangster hiding in Algiers casbah lured to his doom by the love of a tourist from Paris. Duvivier carried this sense of foreboding into two later films about regret. ‘Un carnet de bal’ again stars Bell as a widow seeking out former lovers, and ‘La fin du jour’, which is set in a retired actors’ home. The acceptance of these films matched the mood of a country that saw the Popular Front win power in 1936, only to lose it again a year later.
Jean Renoir, a veteran of silent films, was a humanist with Communist leanings. He found success with ‘La chienne’ in which Michel Simon’s bank cashier kills his whore lover and lets her pimp take the rap. However, it was Renoir’s films made later in the decade that established his reputation in ‘Le crime de Monsieur Lange’, scripted by Leftist poet Jacques Prévert, a publishing collective is threatened by the return of its scoundrel owner, who is then murdered. ‘La grande illusion’ stars Gabin and Erich von Stroheim and critiques World War Through the relationship between three French prisoners of war and their German prison camp commander. ‘La bête humaine’ is based on an Emile Zola novel about a crime of passion and once more stars Gabin as the fated individual. All three films mark Renoir as a master, although it is ‘La règle du jeu’, describing a weekend’s fun among the bourgeois rich and their servants, that marks the summit of his achievement in the decade.
The finest exponent of Poetic Realism was Carné. He formed a firm bond with Prévert on ‘Drôle de drame ou L’étrange aventure du Docteur Molyneux’, an excellent actors piece starring Louis Jouvet as an interfering bishop, but their collaboration combined with ‘Le quai des brumes’. Gabin plays opposite Michèle Morgan, as an army deserter who falls for a seventeen-year-old orphan in a misty dockside location and then pays for his moment of happiness, in an atmosphere saturated with defeatism. The equally doom-laden romance in poverty drama ‘Hotel du Nord’ was made without Prévert and is less convincing. However, ‘Le jour se léve’ is perhaps the supreme example of Poetic Realism. Here Gabin plays a factory worker goaded into jealousy and murder by a vile seducer, reflecting on his fate in his shabby room while the police wait below. The murderer and seducer that was Nazi Germany would soon be at France’s door, but the legacy of the nation’s classic cinema would survive it and produce Carné’s transcendent ‘Les enfants du paradis’.
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