The following interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith was recorded in 2024.

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1936 • France
Starring René Lefèvre, Florelle, Jules Berry

An oft-overlooked jewel from Jean Renoir, this exuberant ode to working-class solidarity is both one of the director’s most thoroughly charming works as well as one of his most sly political statements. Channeli...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1938 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Michel Simon

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, as acts of...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1939 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty

One of the defining works of 1930s poetic-realist cinema, the fourth collaboration between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert is a gripping story of obsessive sexuality and murder star...

Directed by Jean Vigo • 1933 • France
Starring Jean Dasté, Gérard de Bédarieux, Louis Lefebvre

So effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema’s great acts of...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1946 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Pierre Brasseur, Serge Reggiani

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shor...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1936 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Suzy Prim

Jean Renoir’s fascinating adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play softens the bleak social realism of the source material thanks to the director’s gently humanist, distinctly Gallic touch. Comedy an...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1936 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Charles Vanel, Raymond Aimos

With more money comes more problems in this spirited comedic drama, a tribute to everyman camaraderie inspired by the optimistic socialism of the French Popular Front movement. Gallic cinema icons Jean ...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1939 • France
Starring Victor Francen, Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet

A bittersweet reflection on aging, mortality, and the memories and regrets that make up a lifetime, this affecting tragicomedy centers on a coterie of broke, washed-up actors now living in a retiremen...

Directed by Yves Allégret • 1949 • France
Starring Madeleine Robinson, Gérard Philipe, Jean Servais

This moodily poetic noir unfolds in a seaside resort in the winter offseason where an enigmatic man (Gérard Philipe), on the run after committing a murder, checks into a flophouse hotel where he w...

Directed by Jean Grémillon • 1944 • France
Starring Madeleine Renaud, Charles Vanel, Jean Debucourt

Inspired by a true story, this uplifting romantic drama stars Madeleine Renaud as the wife of a mechanic and former fighter pilot (Charles Vanel) who falls in love with the idea of flying herself....

Directed by Jean Vigo • 1934 • France

In Jean Vigo's hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope. Jean (Jean Dasté), a barge captain, marries Juliette (Dita Parlo), an innocent country girl, and the two climb aboard Jean's boat, the L'Atalan...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1932 • France

Julien Duvivier remade his own silent adaptation of a popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century novella and play for the sound era, resulting in one of his most beloved films. In a tremendously moving performance, Robert Lynen plays the neglected young Fra...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1937 • France

A rich widow, nostalgic for the lavish parties of her youth, embarks on a journey to reconnect with the many suitors who once courted her. In doing so, she sets off on a course of discovery, both of herself and of how greatly the world has changed in t...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1937 • United States
Starring Jean Gabin, Gabriel Gabrio, Saturnin Fabre

The notorious Pépé le moko (Jean Gabin, in a truly iconic performance) is a wanted man: women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On ...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1938 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Julien Carette

Based on the classic Emile Zola novel, Jean Renoir’s LA BÊTE HUMAINE was one of the legendary director’s greatest popular successes, and earned star Jean Gabin a permanent place in the hearts of his country...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1938 • France

Hotel Du Nord isn't as well known as the two movies Marcel Carné made before and after, Port Of Shadows and Le Jour Se Lève. But any Carné, especially pre-war Carné (and doubly so with Arletty in the cast), is worth seeing. Annabella is the star of this d...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1939 • France

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis' country château lays bare some ugly tr...

Directed by Jean Grémillon • 1941 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, Madeleine Renaud, Michèle Morgan

Poet Jacques Prévert cowrote this atmospheric tale of the romantic trials of a tugboat captain, played by the iconic French star Jean Gabin. For André (Gabin) and the other members of the Cyclone’s c...

Directed by Jean Grémillon • 1943 • France

A shimmering glass hotel at the top of a remote Provençal mountain provides the setting for a tragicomic tapestry about an obsessive love pentangle, whose principals range from an artist to a hotel manager to a dam worker. Scripted by Jacques Prévert an...

Directed by Jean Delannoy • 1943 • France
Starring Jean Marais, Madeleine Sologne, Jean Murat

Jean Cocteau—who wrote the script in his typical blend of the dreamlike and the mythic—and director Jean Delannoy transpose the immortal tale of Tristan and Isolde to 1940s France in this rhapsodic roma...

Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1933 • France
Starring Harry Baur, Valéry Inkijinoff, Alexandre Rignault

Julien Duvivier’s meticulously crafted adaptation of a novel by legendary crime writer Georges Simenon stars Harry Baur as the author’s most indelible creation, Inspector Jules Maigret, who he...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1945 • France
Starring Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with CHILDREN OF PARADISE, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimon...