Saturnin Fabre

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shortly after the city’s postwar liberation. It’s there that Jean Diego (Yves Montand in one of his first film roles), a former member of the French underground Resistance, has an encounter with destiny as he meets a long-lost comrade, villains of the war, a prophetic tramp, and a beautiful woman who will draw him into an inexorable tragedy. A richly allegorical evocation of a country reckoning with the guilt and national trauma of World War II and the occupation, LES PORTES DE LA NUIT (“The Gates of the Night”) was a tough sell for postwar audiences looking for escapism, but it can now be appreciated for both its haunting atmosphere and unique fusion of poetic fantasy and bitter reality.

On the run in Algiers, a notorious gangster takes refuge among friends in the Casbah. But love tempts him to risk everything and emerge from hiding.