It’s soap, it’s melodrama, have a go if you like, but if it’s absolutely nothing else, Marcel Carné’s 1938 hit Hôtel du Nord is an object lesson in how to use a hair light.
Watch it for its looks rather than its plot, in other words, which slaloms about a touch preposterously, though its actors are beyond criticism. Carné preceded it with Port of Shadows, and followed up with Le Jour Se Lève, though it can’t match either for punch, coherence or consistent characterisation.
Apart from one ridiculous digression to the south of France en route to Egypt, it all takes place in and around the Hôtel du Nord, a Paris flophouse where the entire community congregates, prostitutes come and go, gossip is exchanged and love trysts are embarked upon and abandoned. As the film opens, Carné’s gorgeously fluid crane shot reveals that the hotel is about to have new paying guests: a young couple about to check in.
Renée and Pierre are runaway lovers who have decided to use the hotel as the venue for a last meeting before they kill themselves in a joint suicide. This comes as a shock reveal after all the pearlescent lighting Carné has been lavishing on these two. It’s also a bit of a spoiler, apologies, but it happens very early on and is the set-up for the rest of the story – Renée recovers and is then romantically pursued by a criminal, Edmond, with his own agenda (and redemptive arc). Pierre, contrition itself, turns himself in to the police, but is let out again when Renée insists it was she who fired the gun. Everyone knows this isn’t true.
Meanwhile, around these star-crossed lovers life in the hotel goes on – men carrying on with other men’s wives, kids playing, couples bickering, small acts of kindness, wine, food. It’s a rosy view of working-class life, a benign environment Carné glides through elegantly, lavishing the women in particular with the sort of lighting that sometimes gets the film tagged as poetic realist.
Before Cher, before Drake, French cinema was full of mononymous stars. Here, Arletty and Arabella plays the ancient twin poles of womanhood, the whore and the virgin. Arletty, walking shoulders-first like a boxer throughout, crackles away as the chippy, chirpy Raymonde, a working girl unfazed by any sort of authority but loyal to her pimp, Edmond, who has a past he’s trying to escape. Arabella plays Renée as practical, realistic but naive young woman, the sort of pretty and honest sort that everyone falls in love with, which is precisely what happens when Renée is offered a job at the hotel after recovering from her ordeal.
It is Renée’s simple good nature that is the undoing of Edmond, who all of a sudden wants to renounce everything and run away with her to Egypt. But what about Raymonde? What about Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont)? It is all highly implausible – for this plot development to work both Renée and Edmond have to act completely out of character. This is classic soap – plot trumps personality for a moment of madness.
I could watch it for the light Carné puts in people’s eyes, twin points of beauty that lift every shot. The playing is also fantastic, Arletty particularly good, Annabella just behind her, while Louis Jouvet is a Greek tragic hero as Edmond, eventually yielding to his fate when it finally comes to get him.
It is technically superb throughout but certain scenes stand out, like the big Bastille Day party towards the end, when Carné swings in and around a multitude of revellers as the major plot strands finally come together.
And then suddenly it’s decisively over, the sense of living inside a soap world evaporates and Carné leaves as he entered, but in reverse, his camera swinging out of the hotel, over the road up in the air and backwards down the canal. Job done, it appears to say. Fair enough. It’s not major Carné, but even minor Carné is worth watching.
Hôtel du Nord – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
