Based on a highly literate script by poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, which draws on real-life figures of the 1820s and 1830s, Marcel Carné’s film is a lavish Dickensian drama set among the actors, criminals and aristocrats that orbit around a theatre on Paris’s so-called ‘Boulevard du Crime’.
Four men love the courtesan Garance (Arletty), most tragically the mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), and their romantic intrigues play out in a backstage milieu lovingly recreated by set designer Alexandre Trauner. Trauner had worked with Carné on his classic series of 1930s ‘poetic realist’ dramas – including Drole de Drame (1937) and Hôtel du Nord(1938) – but as a Jew he was forced to work in secrecy on perhaps his grandest achievement. In 1995, the film was voted the greatest French film ever made by 600 industry professionals.
