General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Le Jour se lève

Le Jour se lève (Daybreak) is a 1939 French black-and-white drama directed by Marcel Carné, in which a factory worker named François, barricaded in his top-floor room after killing a rival, relives in flashbacks the events that led to the murder while the police besiege the building until dawn. It is one of the defining works of the prewar French movement called poetic realism and the fourth collaboration between Carné and the screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Marcel Carné; scenario by Jacques Viot, adaptation and dialogues by Jacques Prévert²
Principal cast	Jean Gabin (François), Jules Berry (Valentin), Arletty (Clara), Jacqueline Laurent (Françoise)³
Key crew	Cinematography Curt Courant; sets Alexandre Trauner; music Maurice Jaubert; editing René Le Hénaff²
Production	Sigma (Pierre Frogerais); filmed February to May 1939 at the Paris Studio-Cinéma in Billancourt²
French release	9 June 1939 per the CNC record; the Carné estate site gives 17 June 1939 at the Madeleine-Cinéma in Paris⁴^•²
Censorship	Cut in 1940 (a shot of Arletty nude near a shower curtain); banned as demoralizing in September 1939 and again under Vichy²^•⁵
Restoration	4K restoration by StudioCanal reintegrating the censored footage, released 24 September 2014 for the film's 75th anniversary²

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens with a gunshot: François, a worker in a painting firm, has just killed Valentin, a dog trainer and music-hall entertainer he regards as contemptible. The police surround the tall apartment building on an ordinary square in the Paris suburbs and wait for dawn to storm it. Through the night, François recalls the recent episodes of his life: his meeting with Françoise, a young florist's assistant; his discovery that Valentin may have been her lover; and his affair with Clara, Valentin's former assistant and mistress.⁶ When tear gas is fired into the apartment, François has already shot himself in the heart.⁶

The scenario's originality lay in its construction. Jacques Viot's treatment told the story as the confession of a murderer, built up through a series of flashbacks while he is trapped in a cramped garret with no possibility of escape, a device Carné found little used at the time.⁷ The words and images alternate among three narrative tenses, the present, the past perfect and the past imperfect, and the objects accumulated in François's room, a teddy bear, a brooch, photographs, bicycle inner tubes, carry both realistic and symbolic weight as the story explains them.⁶ Carné called it the most difficult film he had made, in form, technique and style, and wondered whether the public would accept the sudden transitions from a tense and violent present to a slower past.⁷

Production

After the success of Le Quai des brumes, Carné signed Jean Gabin for a second film. Prévert proposed a gangster story, Rue des vertus, but Carné, wary of a market crowded with such plots, turned instead to the four-to-six-page synopsis his neighbor Jacques Viot submitted.⁸ Shooting ran from February to May 1939 at the Paris Studio-Cinéma studios in Billancourt.²

The film's atmosphere rests on the combination of its principal craftsmen. Maurice Jaubert's musical leitmotifs accompany the slow dissolves, Curt Courant's photography gives a twilight light, and Alexandre Trauner's set, an entire working-class Parisian building reconstructed in the studio, is described by the Larousse film dictionary as a quintessence of prewar popular Parisian urbanism.⁶ Trauner insisted on building François's apartment without movable walls, which made filming extremely difficult, and real bullets were shot through them for the finale.¹

Censorship and reception

The film's fatalism met a hostile political moment. Released two years after the demise of the Popular Front and three months before France entered the war, it was seen by some critics as a renunciation of Popular Front ideals, and the military censor board banned it as too defeatist.⁹ The military censorship in September 1939 barred it to viewers under sixteen on the grounds that it was demoralizing, and in 1940 the censor required the removal of the shot of Arletty nude near the shower curtain.² Under the Vichy regime the film was banned outright as too defeatist, and, because of the anti-Jewish laws, the names of cinematographer Curt Courant and production designer Alexandre Trauner were removed from the credits.⁵ The fascist-leaning critics Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach attacked what they called its judaizing aesthetic.⁹

At the 1939 Venice Mostra the film was nominated for the Coupe Mussolini for best film, and it won the Grand Prix du cinéma italien in 1940.⁸^•² Its reputation was redeemed about ten years after release, partly through the efforts of the film theorist André Bazin, whose 1948 study "Fiche du Jour se lève" and the postwar ciné-club movement made it a classic.⁹^•¹⁰ In the 1950s the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, soon to become New Wave filmmakers, attacked Carné's reputation and attributed the film's successes to Prévert.¹¹

Later history and restoration

Hollywood remade the film as The Long Night in 1947.¹² According to the Independent Cinema Office, when RKO Radio Pictures planned that remake it sought to destroy every original print in existence, and the film was thought lost before reappearing in the 1950s.¹³

The 2014 restoration was technically demanding. The image work, done manually by the Eclair laboratory, started from a nitrate dupe negative in an advanced state of decomposition, the camera negative having been destroyed; the sound was restored by Diapason with Eclair, and the grading had to preserve Courant's light.¹⁴ StudioCanal reintegrated the censored shower shot and two other scenes, restoring the names of Courant and Trauner to the opening credits, and released the complete version in cinemas, on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD on 24 September 2014, the film's 75th anniversary year.²^•¹⁵

Place in French cinema

The film is routinely described as a summit of poetic realism, the 1930s school combining left-wing sympathies, lyrical style and a pessimistic view of working-class characters caught by fate.¹¹^•¹⁶ Its flashback-laden regret foreshadows American film noir, and its air of defeat on the eve of World War II has been read as foreshadowing France's collapse in 1940.¹^•¹⁷ Bazin wrote that the narrow frame, tight as Antigone's tomb, drips with fatality, and called the film almost a social documentary on the life of a single working man.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026