General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Last Metro

The Last Metro (French: Le Dernier Métro) is a 1980 French drama film directed by François Truffaut, set in a Paris theater during the German occupation of World War II. Catherine Deneuve plays Marion Steiner, the leading actress who manages the Théâtre Montmartre while her Jewish husband Lucas (Heinz Bennent) hides in its cellar, and Gérard Depardieu plays Bernard Granger, the actor she casts in her new production.¹^•² The film was a major commercial and critical success in France and won ten César Awards in 1981, including Best Film, Best Actor, and Best Actress.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title / release	Le Dernier Métro, France, released 17 September 1980¹
Director and writers	François Truffaut; screenplay by Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman, dialogue also by Jean-Claude Grumberg⁵
Principal cast	Catherine Deneuve (Marion Steiner), Gérard Depardieu (Bernard Granger), Jean Poiret (Jean-Loup Cottins), Heinz Bennent (Lucas Steiner), Andréa Ferréol (Arlette Guillaume)¹
Setting	Paris, September 1942, during the German occupation; a Montmartre theater company struggles to keep working⁶
Awards	Ten César Awards in 1981, including Best Film, Best Actor, and Best Actress; Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Néstor Almendros, music Georges Delerue, editing Martine Barraqué⁵
Production	Les Films du Carrosse, SEDIF, TF1, and SFP; original distributor Gaumont⁵
Runtime	About 131 minutes, color, in French⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in occupied Paris beginning in September 1942. Lucas Steiner, the German Jewish director of the Théâtre Montmartre who had taken refuge in Paris at the start of Nazism, is believed to have fled France; in reality he remains hidden in the theater's cellar, where he can hear everything that happens on stage and secretly continues to guide the staging of his productions.⁶^•⁷ His wife Marion takes over the theater's management and spreads the rumor that he has escaped to South America.⁸

Marion hires Bernard Granger, an actor newly arrived from the Grand Guignol, to star opposite her in the new play, and the two develop feelings for each other.¹^•⁶ Bernard is also secretly working for the Resistance.² The troupe faces mounting pressure from Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), a virulent anti-Semitic drama critic of the collaborationist paper Je suis partout who wants to take over the theater and eventually the Comédie-Française.⁶^•⁷ Around the central pair, the supporting company fills out the backstage world: Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), the stand-in director who navigates between factions; the designer Arlette (Andréa Ferréol), who prefers women to men; and the young Nadine (Sabine Haudepin).⁷ The danger is real: a Gestapo visit forces the cellar to be emptied within minutes, and a young Resistance friend of Bernard's is arrested in a church.⁷ The film closes after the Liberation, with Marion taking her bow flanked by her German Jewish husband and her French lover.⁷

Truffaut's intentions

According to Truffaut, making the film allowed him to realize three wishes he had held for years: bringing the camera backstage in a theater, conjuring the atmosphere of the Nazi occupation of France, and casting Catherine Deneuve, who had long been stuck playing icy, deadly femme fatales, as "a responsible woman".⁸^•³ In his own words, it was "a film of love and adventure" that expressed aversion to all forms of racism and intolerance, along with deep affection for people who had chosen the performer's profession.⁹

The occupation was personal material. Truffaut had sought for several years to make a film with this setting, and he filled the screenplay with details that had struck him in his childhood; he later said that after shooting he felt he had made "the fictional film with the greatest amount of information about daily life under the occupation".¹⁰ The title itself refers to a wartime fact: under the curfew, Parisians leaving evening performances had to catch the last métro, which was always packed.⁷

Style and themes

The film works on two interdependent levels: as another of Truffaut's meditations on art and artifice, in the line of his 1973 backstage film Day for Night, and as a study of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed under collaboration.³^•¹¹ Every character plays a double role, one required by the show and one imposed by the occupation, and nothing in the film is quite what it appears to be.⁷^•³ Marion's ascent toward responsibility and freedom proceeds through necessary lies, including the public declaration "I don't want Jewish actors in my theater", delivered to protect her husband.⁷

Truffaut recreated a studio-built Paris of the 1940s, reduced to the locations the drama required, and directed the actors with what Le Monde called a false naturalness belonging to the very greatest directors, often ending scenes mid-movement without explanation.⁷ The British Board of Film Classification notes that the film contains regular references to antisemitism in the context of Nazism, including slurs, and judges that it does not condone such attitudes.¹²

Reception and awards

The film was a genuine triumph on its 1980 release and became one of Truffaut's most commercially and critically acclaimed works.¹³^•¹¹ At the 1981 César Awards it won ten prizes, a record-setting haul for its year, including Best Film for Truffaut, Best Actor for Depardieu, and Best Actress for Deneuve; Bennent and Ferréol were nominated in the supporting categories.⁴ It was also nominated for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, won the Boston Society of Film Critics and National Board of Review foreign-film awards, and placed third with the New York Film Critics Circle.⁴

English-language critics were cooler. According to the Irish Film Institute, English-language critics for the most part brushed the film aside as slight, viewing it as another sign that the director was in decline, because on the surface it looked like the conventional costume dramas Truffaut as a critic had formerly assailed.³ Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, gave it two and a half stars, judging that Truffaut had achieved the backstage and Deneuve dreams but had not evoked the Occupation well enough to make the film more than a sentimental fantasy.⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 86 percent Tomatometer from 22 reviews and an 80 percent audience score.¹

Production notes

The film was produced by Truffaut's own Les Films du Carrosse with SEDIF, TF1, and SFP, and shot by Néstor Almendros with music by Georges Delerue, Truffaut's frequent composer.⁵ Truffaut invented the ending during shooting.¹⁴ The role of Lucas Steiner, a German Jew, would have justified a French-German co-production, but German distributors disliked the screenplay and wanted a better-known name than Heinz Bennent, on whom Truffaut insisted.¹⁰ Runtime listings vary slightly by source, from 128 minutes at the Cinémathèque française to 131 minutes in the mk2 and Criterion catalogs.⁵^•⁶ The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray as Spine #462 with two audio commentaries, one by Annette Insdorf, author of François Truffaut, and one with Depardieu, historian Jean-Pierre Azéma, and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1980 to 1985

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

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