Port of Shadows

In Brief: Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) is — not unjustly — celebrated today as a kind of precursor to film noir, but the truth is that it's more a very French fatalist romance of a kind that can best be called poetic, trashy melodrama. And that is not a put-down by any means. This is brilliant mood-filmmaking, and it works best if you're predisposed to respond positively to doomed romances of the bas-fonds school. This is the story of an army deserter (Jean Gabin) with anger issues and a stray dog that has attached itself to him. He lands in Le Havre and meets an embattled girl (Michèle Morgan) while hiding out in the lowest of dives —  improbably named "Panama" after its proprietor (Édouard Delmont). She, too, is hiding, in her case from her lustful and unhinged guardian (Michel Simon). It's a bad situation that only gets worse. If anything, there's too much plot (aspects of which might be borrowed from Robert E. Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest), but what sticks with you is the pervasive atmosphere and the movie star luminosity of its two leads.