HOTEL DU NORD (1938)

At twilight, a couple stroll sadly down a street in Paris along a river. At the Hotel du Nord, where a raucous dinner is going on in the restaurant area, they stop to get a room for the night. The kind-hearted Madam Lecouvreur rents a room to the gloomy pair, Pierre and Renée, and we discover that, penniless with no prospects, they have entered into a murder-suicide pact. Pierre shoots her, then panics and can't finish himself off. Edmond, a pimp in the next room, comes in and tells Pierre to leave through the window, and Edmond steals the pistol that's left behind. The party is disrupted when the police arrive, but Renée's wound was not fatal and as she recovers in a hospital, Pierre turns himself in to the police, even though she tells the police that she shot herself. When she recovers, Renée is given room and board by Lecouvreur in exchange for assisting the chambermaid. Meanwhile, we follow other characters living at the hotel. Edmond and his prostitute girlfriend Raymonde have a history of petty crime. Two shady men come looking for Edmond, though Raymonde tries to put them off. Edmond soon hits it off with Renée and he talks her into going to Cairo with him. We also meet Prosper, a lock keeper on the river who is being cheated on by his wife; Adrien, a flamboyantly gay candy maker; Jeanne, the chambermaid who is having her own side fling with Edmond; and Monolo, a boy orphaned by the Spanish Civil War who is doted on by Lecouvreur. The major stories come together during an evening street celebration of Bastille Day.

This is a charming, eccentric film in the genre known as poetic realism, stories of common working class people shot in a moody or dreamy style. Despite the scenes set on the street and near the river, the film was shot on an elaborate studio lot, giving the movie a slightly artificial feel (much like Casablanca) that actually enhances our experience of the narrative. The opening twilight shot is indeed poetic, as is the final shot along the same street which shows the last straggling Bastille Day celebrants still dancing. A bit like Grand Hotel, we get alternating glimpses into the lives of the hotel inhabitants, and moral judgments of good and bad behavior are not easy to make because most of the characters embody both impulses. Jean-Pierre Aumont is quite good as Pierre whom we sympathize with even though he runs out on his seemingly dead lover; he has the feel of a central character, but because he spends a good chunk of time in jail, we don't get to know him as well as we'd like. If there is a truly central character, it's probably Renée (Annabella) who gets entangled in a couple of plotlines. If anyone's gonna come to a bad end, you know it will be Edmond (Louis Jouvet) but we come to see his character in different lights at different times—he has ambitions to be a photographer and wants to change his name when he goes to Cairo to escape his past. Arletty is fine as Raymonde, who possibly gets as much screen time as Annabella. Though it has its melodramatic moments (there's a great shot of someone standing on a bridge at night in the fog, seriously contemplating suicide), the overall tone remains light, and the bouncing between stories stops any one from overstaying its welcome. Pictured are Aumont and Annabella. [TCM]