Les enfants du Paradis (The children of Paradise) 1945 - A timeless love saga

IMDB Link
IMDB rating: 8,3

Director: Marcel Carne
Main Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoir, Maria Casares, Gaston Modot

"Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1840s, Jacques Prévert's screenplay concerns four men in love with the mysterious Garance (Arletty). Each loves Garance in his own fashion, but only the intentions of sensitive mime-actor Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault) are entirely honorable; as a result, it is he who suffers most, hurdling one obstacle after another in pursuit of an evidently unattainable goal. In the stylized fashion of 19th-century French drama, many grand passions are spent during the film's totally absorbing 195 minutes. The film was produced under overwhelmingly difficult circumstances during the Nazi occupation of France, and many of the participants/creators were members of the Maquis, so the movie's existence itself is somewhat miraculous. Children of Paradise has gone on to become one of the great romantic classics of international cinema." - www.allmovie.com

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Le jour se leve (Daybreak) 1939 - A nice example of French poetic realism

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031514/
IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Marcel Carne
Main Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Bernard Blier, Jacqueline Laurent

"Marcel Carne's Le jour se leve/Daybreak turns a murder story into an evocative examination of a man trapped by circumstances beyond his control. In the script by Carne's main collaborator Jacques Prevert, Jean Gabin's working-class François shoots a man and holes up in his room, thinking back, in an impeccably structured flashback, to the events that brought him to that moment. Carne's camera does not shy away from the desperate, claustrophobic details of working-class life, yet the possibility for human connection gives François's existence hope, until the sadistic Valentin intervenes. The play of light and shadows as François waits out the night invests the surroundings' realistic drabness with a poetic sense of doom, matching the implacable fate that awaits the decent, tormented man. Trading on Gabin's image as a strong yet tender-hearted hero, Le jour se leve's François was seen as not just a man condemned by his class and human weakness but also the image of a country about to be overcome by the diabolical outside forces of World War II." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/le-jour-se-l%C3%A8ve-v28642

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