Possibly the zenith of poetic realism

Port of shadows is considered one of the most prestigious French films. Probably one of the seminal works of poetic realism, which prefigured the aesthetic of the film-noir genre, it hasn't dated in the slightest, in fact, it seems even greater today when compared with the products of today's creatively paralysed industries.

Indispensable to any assessment of this imperishable masterwork would be knowledge of the luminaries Carne gathered around him in creating it. He collaborated with Jacques Prevert, one of the screen's pre-eminent dialogists, the set design was by Alexandre Trauner, one of the best of his kind as well, and of course there's two of the finest french actors of the era, Jean Gabin and Michel Simon.

Gabin is superb as the pacifist deserter Jean, who symbolises the existential angst of the morally commendable individual in a corrupt society. It is a film about innocence assailed on all sides by depravity, embodied in the characters of Zabel, played by Michel Simon, and pseudo-tough-guy Lucien, Pierre Brasseur, an actor seemingly neglected by posterity, who would later go on to play Frederick Lemaitre in Children of Paradise and would also star in some of the best films of Georges Franju.

Like other poetic-realist works, one of the film's defining characteristics is its mixture of antipodean visual styles, such as realism and poetry, naturalism and stylisation.

The narrative is clearly expressive of a pessimistic view of the world, and the prevailing mood of despondency, disillusionment and tragic destiny is beautifully rendered through the gradation of grays in the photography colouring the fog-enshrouded landscape, and of course Maurice Jaubert's lugubrious music multiplies this effect. All this gives the film a rare unity, a sense of ineluctable doom and a uniformity of texture that makes it a work of profound bleakness!

It is rightly considered by many film scholars to be a seminal work in the history of the french cinema, and was supposedly one of Ingmar Bergman's favourite films.