Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Hôtel du Nord (1938)  is a French classic classic French proto film noir doomed pimp and darkly comic bickering dialogued suicide and true romance couple almost on the run prostitute prison and imprisonment ensemble cast melodrama of working class Parisien life from Marcel Carné and starring Arletty and Louise Jouvet.

Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord (1938) emerges from the late interwar period in France, perched delicately on the brink of catastrophe. Its mood of dreamy disillusionment and marginal existence is a quiet whisper of the cultural malaise circulating through a Europe growing weary of its own shadows. 

La Chienne (1931)

La Chienne (1931) is a French poetic realist film de pur génie puppet show de la vie misery of faked identities, Jean Renoir-noir Paris night-time street scenes murder and fated descent into tramping bummery, all round classique de poetic realism, classic film noir, and ardent ancient treasury of la cinematique-du-crime, in which a dupe is duped by a couple of unsympathetic street denizens of poverty struck human villainy wherein all you own are your clothes and your cigarettes, while also satirising the middle and business merchant class, and the art class, with its mendicant conclusion and historic remaking by Fritz Lang in the equally immortal and immoral bum-quest to the bottom that is Scarlet Street (1945)

Pépé le Moko (1937)

Pépé le Moko (1937) is a mouche-noir French proto film noir Casbah-bound crime glamour seduction violence and poetic realist romance and intrigue police procedural classic of crime cinema and of French cinema, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier.

As for films that stand the test of time and remain classics of cinema, and also classics of film noir, enough in fact to be here heralded and touted as an example of nothing less than classic film noir, then one must watch them to make the mind up, and not take any old soul's advice on that.

Watching Pépé le Moko (1937) is no duty however and will be a true pleasure, for the acting and the intrigue, for the framing and the fun, for the well constructed mis en scene and the en scene itself, of the many corridored confusions of The Casbah are the perfect and perfectly realised backdrop of this movie wonder. 

In the context of this, Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, “le Moko” is not a surname but a nickname. It derives from the French slang term moko, which was used to describe people from the region around Toulon and Marseille in southern France, particularly dockworkers and sailors. 

Le jour se lève (1939)

Le jour se lève (1939) is a classic French Proto-Noir romantic murder drama that is considered to be one of the finest examples of the style known as poetic realism.

This French all-time classique tells the story of foundry worker François (Jean Gabin) who shoots and kills a man called Valentin (played by Jules Berry). 

François then locks himself in his apartment and is soon besieged by the police, who fail in an attempt to shoot their way into the room. As the police regroup to decide how to apprehend him, and as a crowd forms outside, François begins to reminisce on how he came to be in this predicament.

Although not made in the United States and pre-dating the film noir movement it is incredible how well Le jour se lève (1939) fits within the film noir canon. For a start, its flashback style is more than suggestive of noir — in fact the flashback itself is done with more consideration and emotion that is normally found in typical American noir.

La Grande Illusion (1937)

La Grande Illusion (1937) is a film about class issues, that doesn't take sides. 

It's an intreresting take, and pretty unusual when you think about it. But La Grande Illusion doesn't present nor admit to a bias and sees everybody as sympathetic, including the tragic aristocrats at the heart of the problems.

La Grande Illusion does at the same pretend to a strange vision of trench warfare.  In the first scene Jean Gabin is in his shoddily built mess, which has a well-stocked bar and waiter.  

The very next scene shows the actor Eric Von Stroheim and the Germans in their own similarly shack-like officers' mess, with an even better bar, again with its own proud barkeep.

Maybe that was what it was like.  I don't know, but the German bar certainly seems to have a hell of a lot of liquor as well as a cocktail shaker.

Le Quai des Brumes (1938)

Film noir may be associated with Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s but it didn't start there.  It came from Europe, and if you need evidence of this then look no further than Le Quai des Brumes, directed by Marcel Carné and released in 1938.

In terms of European influence on film noir, we often hear about the German expressionist style which took off in the 1920s, but also of note is a school of film-making which is exemplified in Le Quai des Brumes, that of Poetic Realism.

What that means is that the crummy back-alley feel of film noir, and the often impoverished urban settings and doomed romances of film noir, evolved in part from films like Le Quai des Brumes.