In Marcel Carné's 1949 film La Marie du port, the great French actor Jean Gabin stars as Henri, a wealthy restaurant and cinema owner from Cherbourg who accompanies his younger mistress Odile (Blanchette Brunoy) back to her home town when her father dies. She mourns and tries to deal with her awful uncles; he enjoys a drink or three at the local cafe. Seemingly on a whim, he decides to buy a boat that's being auctioned off by creditors.
Cleaning and overhauling his new acquisition keeps him in town, mostly hanging out at the cafe where Odile's even younger sister Marie (Nicole Courcel) works as a waitress. Henri has his Odile, and Marie has a boyfriend of her own--yet the aging businessman and the sharp-tongued 18-year-old fall in love. Acting on it becomes another matter entirely.
Considered as nothing more than the sum of what's projected on the screen, La Marie du port is a pleasant, well-observed little film, with two wonderful lead performances. It is more than that, however, because of the reasons for why the film was made. No, I don't know any gossip about the filming (nor do I think stories like that--entertaining as they may be--improve the quality of movies in any way). What I'm referring to is how this film fits into the oeuvre of director Carné; the interesting part is that it doesn't 0at all.
Carné is certainly best remembered for Children of Paradise, a lengthy, floridly romantic, utterly absorbing salute to the theater and theater people. Though it's unfair to reduce a career to one film, it rather works in this case. At his best, Carné excelled at outsized escapist fantasy coated with the fashionable gloom of urban fatalism. But his career took a major downturn with the extravagant Les Portes de la Nuit (1946), his film about the postwar Parisian black market. It was a wild failure, and when his subsequent feature began to go over budget, Carné--who for the previous decade was France's most celebrated director--was unceremoniously dumped. It's not just in Hollywood where you're only as good as your last picture's gross.
Then, after three years of nothing, came La Marie du port. Willfully reined-in and unstylized, it joins the ranks of intriguing movies made just to prove their directors could work on time and under budget. Like Orson Welles' The Stranger or Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (or, quite likely, Tim Burton's upcoming Sleepy Hollow, which follows two expensive flops), La Marie du port is all about rehabilitating its director in the eyes of the only people that matter: the ones with the money. All these films have a certain apologetic air about them in common, avoiding excess to such a degree that their maker's personality isn't so much missing as it is whited out and highlighted in negative. Just so here, where the dutifully realistic story and settings bring out not the worst Carné, but just his opposite--a clear-eyed realist who is not above a happy ending as crass and artificial as his previous sad ones.
You can't keep your own personality locked up forever, and the old romantic director pops up here and there: the long funeral procession that winds through town, reflecting its image upon a window through which Gabin watches; the meetings of Marie and her lover Marcel (Claude Romain) next to ships in dry-dock, their relationship foredoomed by those rusting hulls; and Marcel's stormy confrontation with his drunken father. More often, though, the tone is somber and matter-of-fact.
This actually leads to some improvements over the old Carné. Freed from his usual melodramatic pessimism, he becomes a rather accurate and unsentimental observer of human behavior. Marie and Henri are both marvelously drawn characters, refreshingly selfish and short-sighted at times. Courcel expertly captures the tender confusion of small-town Marie, as well as her arrogance and overzealous expectations.
And if anything in this well done but modestly ambitious movie has claims to greatness, it's Gabin. Several years after playing the quintessential self-romanticizing French working man for Carné in Le Jour se lÚve, Gabin has created in Henri a marvelous portrait of middle-aged disillusionment. The joy with which this wealthy businessman throws himself into fixing his boat's engine; his hopeful courting of youth (through young romantic attachments and by playing up to the town's triumphant soccer team); his pensive dismissal of all people in love as idiots; and even the sly way he indicates to the bed when lovely female visitors are in his office--all perfectly reflect a man uncomfortable with his lot in life, but not enough to think he can do anything about it.