Gates of the Night

Paris just after the Liberation, and a single night spent around the metro: a man back from the Resistance, a family accused of collaboration, and a tramp-like figure who announces destiny. By morning they have all brushed against one another. The film is not interested in postwar reckoning. It is interested in the inevitability of fate: in the familiar mould of poetic realism the characters walk towards their own endings and nobody can turn aside. The form rests on a Paris built entirely in the studio. Metro entrances, wet pavements and foggy streets were constructed as sets. The production story is worth knowing. Pathé stipulated Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich in the leads; neither warmed to the project and the two chose instead to appear together that year in Martin Roumagnac. They were replaced by two near-unknowns, Yves Montand and Nathalie Nattier. The song heard in the film, Les Feuilles mortes by Prévert and Kosma, went on to become one of the most sung French songs in the world. Marcel Carné directed, and this was his last collaboration with the writer Jacques Prévert; commercial and critical failure separated the two masters of poetic realism. The film was reassessed much later. Pierre Brasseur and Serge Reggiani are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who love French poetic realism and the atmosphere of postwar Paris. Who it is not for: anyone wanting realism. The theme of fate now plays as heavy and theatrical.