After a five-year interruption in his career due to the war during which he served as the director of a dozen documentaries in the Why We Fight series, Anatole Litvak not only returned to Hollywood but also to his French poetic realist roots. The producers Robert and Raymond Hakim who had the American rights to Le Jour se lève, the 1939 classic by Marcel Carné, suggested a remake. Crazy as it sounded, Litvak took it on. Very close to the original in structure and content, it’s about an ex-soldier who now works in a foundry. Originally played by Jean Gabin, the remake stars Henry Fonda who had a rich back catalogue of doomed and fallen heroes, starting with Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once. Fonda’s Joe Adams falls in love with Jo Ann, a wide-eyed girl manipulated by an unscrupulous nightclub magician. For the part of the girl, Litvak unearthed another talent, this time Barbara Bel Geddes in her screen debut. Vincent Price as the seedy magician plays one of his classic villains. As the film opens, Price is shot dead in Fonda’s dilapidated apartment; flashbacks reveal the thread of events leading up to the murder. Regular collaborators were called in, including scriptwriter John Wexley and cinematographer Sol Polito who delivers moody and melancholic visuals that became defining images of film noir.
As a remake, the film suffered from the puritanical critical approach that gives preference to the original over a strictly commercial undertaking. The danger in this practice lies in missing the nuances of Litvak’s fine work, not fully grasping the cumulative effect the war had on his cinema. The optimism and naivety of the couple in the remake is dramatically different from the fatalistic angst of the original, therefore the sense of a withered environment leading to tragedy is more heightened in Litvak’s version. Here, existentialist disgust has been transmuted into the unfulfilled promises of industrial small town America.

Ehsan Khoshbakht