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Hôtel du Nord

Director: Marcel Carné
Year: 1938
Run-time: 1 hr 35 min

- Carné's second film of 1938 doesn't share all of the same film noir trappings as Port of Shadows, but it still reminds me a lot of the Marseilles trilogy in the tragic humanism of its hopeless characters. This film starts out as a series of inter-related stories centered at a Paris hotel, before merging those stories together. Carné doesn't shy away from themes that would never fly past the American Hayes code, and as such his early films have a brutal and refreshing honesty, even though I wouldn't claim this is an accurate representation of the French lower classes. Also like the Marseilles trilogy, there's a heavy focus on dialogue that makes this seem like it originated as a play (it was actually first a collection of short stories.)
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