THE CINEMA
Quai des Brumes." At the Academy.
ONE may guess that this film owes a considerable debt to Cavalcanti's early masterpiece En Rade, for some of the resemblances are very striking. Like En Rade, Quai des Brumes achieves much of its effect by the detailed building up of the atmosphere of a seaport ; and it follows the earlier film in creating that all too rare combination of reality and fantasy of which Cavalcanti and Vigo are the finest exponents. But whereas En Rade presented a tragic story in terms of strict reality and a slender story whose strength was in its ordinari- ness, Quai des Brumes relates its tragedy to the melodramatics of the gangster.
Curiously enough the balance is redressed in another way. For Cavalcanti added to his ordinary little story a fantasy in the form of the characters of Hessling and Lissenko, who re- presented the dream as well as the fact, while Maurice Came, in Quai des Brumes, offsets the melodramatics by the definite flesh-and-blood quality of Gabin and Michele Morgan.
This comparison is not uninstructive, for it makes clear why En Rade is the better film of the two; and, in assessing the excellence of Quai des Brumes (for excellent it certainly is), we may begin by writing off the essential melodramatic weak- ness and concentrate on its merits, which are many. It is the story of a deserter from the Army who comes to Le Havre hoping to get a passage to South America. He meets, in a gangster's hide-out, a girl who is the ward of a rival gangster masquerading as a respectable shopkeeper. He falls in love with the girl and becomes thereby involved with the gangs. A remorseless fate—on the eve of his departure for Venezuela —forces him to commit one murder, and to be the victim of a second. Jean Gabin, as the soldier, gives a magnificent per- formance, far superior even to his work in La Grande Illu- sion; he brings out both the man's essential sincerity, and also his inarticulate and unavailing struggles to express that sincerity. As the girl, Michele Morgan, a young lady of ex- quisite beauty, reveals a dramatic ability all the more effective because of its restraint and entirely astonishing in one so young (she is only eighteen).
The scenario and dialogue of Quai des Brumes are by Jacques Prevert; his influence on contemporary French cinema —and more particularly on Came—tends to be underesti- mated. As a dialogue writer he is magnificent; and to listen to Gabin's conversations in this film is to receive not merely the dramatic implications of the plot, but also the universal character of the tommy, the poilu, l'homme moyen sensuel, or any other figure from the vast twilight of three-quarters of humankind. As a scenarist his ingenuity is only equalled by his unerring taste and his sense of the dramatic ; the script of Quai des Brumes is a model to all script-writers. Armed with these initial advantages, Came has seized the opportunity, already noted, of establishing that borderline mood of the real and the dreamlike which is .an especial per- quisite of the cinema. The scenes of the hide-out, a tumbledown shack on the edge of the harbour wall, are shot with a Zola-esque attention to realism, and then, by the strange alchemy of the characters who dwell therein, a mood of waking dream—the mood in which the dream and the reality are completely fused—is established. It is exquisite, and it has not been seen since Vigo's Atalante. Throughout the film the pictorial composition is finely chosen, and the movements of the camera through the mists of Le Havre are all the more effective in that they are inconspicuous; it is indeed not the least merit of the film that it uses a minimum of the fades, wipes, dissolves and other trickeries which can so easily be used merely as gilt to an essential incompetence.
Finally, one may note the music with which—often in a delicious undertone—Maurice Jaubert has enriched certain of the sequence. He is one of the few composers of talent who has film as well as music in his blood, and it would be foolish to ignore the legitimate addition to our emotion which his simple melodies and economic orchestration produce. Quai des Brumes has mood, atmosphere, and a sense of genuine tragedy ; its images will remain in the mind longer than many
films of more immediate sensation. BASIL WRIGHT.
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