Daybreak

François has locked himself in a room, police are at the door and a crowd has gathered below. He has shot a man. Across a siege that lasts until morning, cigarette by cigarette, the film uses flashbacks to explain how he ended up in that room. The subject is not the killing but the trap. François is a worker with few options and no way out, and the form imitates that helplessness: every return to the past brings him closer to the room, so the narration cannot escape either. The form is a textbook case of French poetic realism. The tall, narrow apartment facade designed by Alexandre Trauner is almost a character, and the light, the fog and the stairwell say the same thing his psychology does. The Vichy authorities banned the film as defeatist. Later, when RKO remade it in 1947 as The Long Night, the studio tried to pull prints of the original from circulation; the film was hard to see for years before being restored. Marcel Carné directs from a screenplay by Jacques Prévert. Jean Gabin leads, and Jules Berry plays one of cinema's most repellent villains, with Jacqueline Laurent and Arletty completing the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like classical French cinema and stories whose fate is settled in advance. Who it is not for: anyone wanting suspense; the ending is announced in the first scene and the film makes no attempt to hide it.