Les portes de la nuit (1946)

English title: Gates of the Night.

Post-Liberation Paris. A man who has survived torture by the Nazis is visited by his wartime buddy who thought he was dead. In that same apartment building lives a former collaborator and his son, and also a poor street merchant and his big family.

The only thing this film should be remembered for is its lighting, the dramatic effect of which was pointed out in "The Cinema as Art" (by Ralph Stephenson and Jean R. Debrix). Otherwise, it is "poetic realism" (a misguided denomination if there ever was one) gone awry, and no doubt best viewed with an eye for involuntary comedy. Say, for comical enhancement, one imagines the parts played by lookalikes: Montand would be replaced by Benigni, Vilar by Englund in full 'Freddy Kruger' attire, Carette by Celestino just as he looked like in O Ébrio, and so on as your imagination should dictate. Should one take the film seriously, one would have a hard time coping with the sordid manipulation of characters' fates in order for them to fit the one-sided moral standard assumed by the film, which makes a cartoon villain out of a Gestapo informer and a hero out of a Stalinist conspirator. The demands posed by this fictional framework go as far as making the 'heroes' abstain from denouncing the Gestapo informer "so as not to be his equals". Really, one cannot get more laughable than that.

Rating: 31