Hôtel du Nord
Marcel Carné (1938)
The names on the screenplay don’t include Marcel Carné’s usual film-making partner of the time, the poet and scenarist Jacques Prévert. The two of them are seen by some as virtual co-auteurs of classics of ‘poetic realism’ in French cinema. Does Prévert’s absence from the credits explain why Hôtel du Nord is rather less well known than other Carné films of the late 1930s – Drôle de drame, Le quai des brumes, Le jour se lève? Whatever the reason(s) for this, I preferred Hôtel du Nord to Drôle de drame – maybe even to Le quai des brumes, impressive though the latter often is. Carné was remarkably productive in the years up to and including 1939; the four films mentioned were released in France in the space of less than two years, Le quai des brumes and Hôtel du Nord only a few months apart in 1938 – a reflection not just of their director’s creativity and industry, but also of a widespread expectation that war in Europe was imminent. There was no movie-making time to lose.
Le quai des brumes (English title Port of Shadows) is steeped in fatalism about impending conflict and catastrophe. The Wikipedia page on Hôtel du Nord explains that ‘After the controversy over the army deserter in Port of Shadows, Carné wanted to steer clear of anything with political implications for his next film. With Hôtel du Nord, Carné reduced any politics to that of the romantic relationships’. That’s a bit misleading. At the start, Carné introduces his dramatis personae, and the Paris title location they share; we learn that the Hôtel du Nord’s proprietors, a married couple, have recently adopted a young Spanish boy, a traumatised orphan refugee from the Civil War taking place in his own country. The film’s climax is set amid Bastille Day celebrations in the street outside the hotel. I don’t think it’s only hindsight – the knowledge that Paris street-parties wouldn’t be happening for much longer – that gives this episode a carpe diem quality.
The ‘romantic relationships’ involve three pairings and one temporary rearrangement among them. The hotel proprietors, Louise and Émile Lecouvreur (Jeanne Marken and André Brunot), are simply described – happily married and good-hearted. One of their resident guests, prostitute Raymonde (Arletty), has a room upstairs where her pimp, Edmond (Louis Jouvet), is also a frequent visitor. A young couple, Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), engaged to each other, are new arrivals in the room next door. They’re in love but despairing that they can’t afford to marry, so much so that they’ve decided to end their lives without further delay. Pierre makes a hash of this, shooting Renée before failing to kill himself. By now, Raymonde has gone out to work for the evening; hearing the gunshot, Edmond enters the next-door room; after telling Pierre to flee, Edmond picks up the pistol used to shoot Renée. She’s rushed to hospital and, after emergency surgery, recovers. Although Edmond holds on to the pistol, Pierre is arrested for attempted murder. His fiancée tells the police, but in vain, that this was a botched suicide pact.
Renée returns to the hotel, where the Lecouvreurs offer her bed, board and work as a chambermaid. As well as proving good for business – her pretty face has appeared in all the newspapers – she attracts the attentions of Edmond. Two criminals he’s mixed up with are, as Edmond knows from Raymonde, on his trail and planning to kill him. He confides in Renée, who agrees to run away with him to Marseille, from where they’ll board a ship bound for Egypt. Renée then changes her mind. She feels compelled to return to Paris and the Hôtel du Nord, where she learns that the charges against Pierre have been dropped and he’ll soon be a free man. As the locals enjoy Bastille Day, Renée spots Edmond near the hotel and warns him that his would-be assassins are waiting for him upstairs. Confronting one of the pair, Edmond presents him with Pierre’s pistol. Another gunshot is heard, though not in the noisy street outside.
‘Grand Hotel – people coming, going – nothing ever happens’, says a character, most inaccurately, at the start of Edmund Goulding’s all-star melodrama Grand Hotel (1932). At the other end of the film, someone else says, ‘There are Grand Hotels everywhere in the world’. The Hôtel du Nord is far from grand – a small, downmarket place, in a working-class district of Paris – but it’s no less microcosmic than its Hollywood predecessor, and its characters’ stories are more involving. Hôtel du Nord’s screenplay, by Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeanson, is adapted from a popular 1929 novel of the same name by Eugène Dabit, who was, according to Wikipedia, a ‘socialist writer’ (a friend and political associate of André Gide). Carné’s treatment of Dabit’s material is suitably democratic: nearly everyone in the film is worthy of audience interest and sympathy, regardless of their flaws or foibles. There are startling tonal changes as the narrative switches between romantic agonies and existential acts, but Carné handles these adroitly. The film’s mood is coherent. BFI’s handout for this screening comprised a Sight and Sound (March 1999) piece on Hôtel du Nord by Ginette Vincendeau, who does well to quote Graham Greene on the film:
‘… we believe in the desperate lovers and the suicide pact on the brass bed in the shabby room, just because of the bicyclists on the quay, the pimp quarrelling with his woman in another room, and the First-Communion party [for a young girl, which takes place in the Lecouvreurs’ quarters downstairs].’
The ‘filmmakers wanted to shoot quickly to avoid any delays that could be caused by the outbreak of war … Carné and his producer Joseph Lucachevitch thought that it would be too difficult to shoot the film … on the Canal Saint-Martin [location of the actual Hôtel du Nord]. Instead, they reconstructed the hotel and canal at the Billancourt Studios. …’ (Wikipedia again). The art director, Alexandre Trauner, did a great job. The main setting is so intensely convincing that the short Marseille interlude feels almost dislocating.
A terrific cast features actors already familiar from other Carné films, like Jean-Pierre Aumont and Louis Jouvet. They’re among the best things in Drôle de drame, and standouts in Hôtel du Nord too, as two men – in different ways and at different stages of the story – at the end of their tether. There are others here best remembered for their appearance in the film generally considered the apotheosis of Carné and Prévert’s poetic realism – Les enfants du paradis (1945). Marcel Pérès, a chauffeur in Le quai des brumes and a restaurant customer here, would go on to play the anxiously irritable manager of the Funambules theatre in the later film; Jeanne Marken would be Madame Hermine, Frédéric Lemaître’s comically flirtatious landlady, in Les enfants.
And then there’s Arletty, the star performer in Hôtel du Nord and whose Garance is perhaps the most memorable of all characters in Les enfants du paradis. The contrasts between the roles of Garance and Raymonde, and Arletty’s performances in them, are fascinating. Both women can be termed sex workers, but Garance has evolved from streetwalker into high-society courtesan. She’s solemnly worldly-wise, calmly cynical, whereas Arletty’s volatile, coarsely vivid Raymonde has a harsh voice, often raised. One of her angriest utterances – ‘Atmosphère! Atmosphère! Est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?!’ (‘Atmosphere! Atmosphere! Do I look like an atmosphere?!’) – rather mystifyingly became one of French cinema’s most celebrated one-liners, much more famous than the film in which it’s delivered.
Hôtel du Nord’s Bastille Day climax, with a busy street oblivious to Edmond’s death in the nearby hotel room, also anticipates Les enfants du paradis, whose tragic romantic finale takes place on the ‘Boulevard du Crime’: the street is swarming with people enjoying the Paris carnival, unaware of Baptiste Deburau’s heartbreak as he tries and fails to attract Garance’s attention in the crowd before her carriage drives away. Those street celebrations in Les enfants du paradis are, in cinema mythology, linked to the recent liberation of Paris following the Nazi Occupation (though in fact they were shot in Nice, on a huge outdoor set that Carné had constructed). In Hôtel du Nord’s quieter closing sequence, it’s early next morning, and a fine day. Pierre has been released from custody and is reunited with Renée; they sit on the same canal-side bench by the hotel where they sat in their opening scene. He remarks that ‘Le jour se lève’ . The words are doubly resonant, as the title of the next entry in Marcel Carné’s filmography and because, only a few weeks after Le jour se lève arrived in cinemas, World War II began.
4 August 2026