Les Maudits (René Clément, 1947)

René Clément's Les Maudits has sometimes been known as The Damned, but lately people have turned to using the French title, perhaps to avoid confusion with Luchino Visconti's 1969 film called The Damned. The confusion is understandable: Both films are about Nazis. In Clément's film, a group of Nazi officials and their hangers-on board a submarine in April 1945. Seeing the writing on the wall, they hope to make it to South America to establish an outpost of what's left of the Reich, but as they're passing through the English channel they're spotted by a destroyer that drops depth charges. The sub is unharmed, but Hilde Garosi (Florence Marly) is knocked unconscious. She's the wife of one of the passengers, an Italian industrialist (Fosco Giachetti), and the mistress of another, a Nazi general (Kurt Kronenfeld), so a contingent is sent ashore into liberated France to find a doctor. Henri Vidal plays Dr. Guilbert, who also serves as a narrator for the film. Having been shanghaied into service on the sub, Guilbert knows that once his usefulness in treating Hilde, who has a mild concussion, is over his days are numbered, so he diagnoses a crew member with a sore throat as having diphtheria, necessitating quarantine and continued treatment. The rest is a fairly suspenseful and engaging submarine movie, with some superb camerawork in the confines of the ship. The cinematographer is Henri Alekan, who pulls off a great tracking shot down the length of the sub, which must have been quite a tour de force in the days before Steadicams. The screenplay by Clément, Jacques Rémy, and Henri Jeanson skillfully gives the mostly unsavory characters complexity, although Marly is a little too much the icily glamorous blond stereotype and Jo Dest, as the SS leader Forster, couldn't be more hissable. Michel Auclair has some good moments as Willy Morus, Forster's aide (and, by implication, boy toy). Although Vidal is the film's ostensible hero, top billing went to the great character actor Marcel Dalio (billed, as often he was in France, by only his surname) in what amounts to a small cameo role as Larga, the South American contact for the Nazis.  

Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938)

Bernard Blier and Arletty in Hõtel du Nord

Raymonde: Arletty
Edmond: Louis Jouvet
Renée: Annabella
Pierre: Jean-Pierre Aumont
Louise Lecouvreur: Jane Marken
Emile Lecouvreur: André Brunot
Maltaverne: René Bergeron
Ginette: Paulette Dubost
Adrien: François Périer
Kenel: Andrex
Nazarède: Henri Bosc
The Surgeon: Marcel André
Prosper: Bernard Blier
Munar: Jacques Louvigny
The Commissioner: Armand Lurville
The Nurse: Génia Vaury

Director: Marcel Carné
Screenplay: Henri Jeanson, Jean Aurenche
Based on a novel by Eugène Dabit
Cinematography: Louis Née, Armand Thirard
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Marthe Gottié, René Le Hénaff
Music: Maurice Jaubert

I had seen Arletty in a movie only once before, as the fascinating, enigmatic Garance in Marcel Carné's great Children of Paradise (1945), so I was completely unprepared for her performance as the raucous streetwalker Raymonde in Hôtel du Nord. Raymonde shares a room in the hotel with Edmond, a photographer who is hiding out from his old cronies in the Parisian underworld. The film begins with a traveling shot along the canal that flanks the hotel, where we first see a young pair of lovers, Pierre and Renée, walking arm in arm. Inside the hotel, the residents are celebrating the first communion of the daughter of Maltaverne, a policeman who lives at the hotel. (It's a diverse household.) Pierre and Renée enter and request a room for the night, but instead of making love, they have decided on a suicide pact: He will shoot her, then kill himself. He holds up the first part of the bargain, but then chickens out. Edmond, who has been in his darkroom, hears the shot and breaks down the door, finding Renée apparently dead and Pierre cowering indecisively. Taking the gun from Pierre, Edmond urges him to flee. (The gun becomes a Chekhov's gun when Edmond first tosses it away and then recovers it and stashes it in a drawer.) Renée recovers from the gunshot, and Pierre, torn with guilt, turns himself into the police as an attempted murderer and is sent to prison. After she recuperates, Renée returns to the hotel to collect her things, and is offered a job there by Madame Lecouvreur, the wife of the proprietor. And so the story of the suicidal lovers begins to intertwine with that of Edmond and Raymonde. It's all neatly done, with a great deal of atmosphere (a word that Raymonde will give a particular spin to), much of it created by Alexandre Trauner's set, a re-creation in the studios at Billancourt of the actual hotel and the Canal St. Martin.  The film's melodrama is alleviated by the ensemble work and the performances of Jouvet, who can switch from menacing to vulnerable in an instant, and Arletty, who makes the tough, worldly wise Raymonde often very funny. The film concludes with Carné's skillful staging of an elaborate Bastille Day sequence that anticipates the crowd scenes in Children of Paradise.