Port of Shadows Trailer (1939)

Trailer for Port of Shadows.

When Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserter from the Colonial Army, arrives in Le Havre searching for a place to lie low, he doesn’t expect to wind up in the middle of a percolating dispute to between local “tough” guy Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) and distinctively-bearded shop owner Zabel (Michel Simon). Nor does he expect to fall in love with Nelly (Michèle Morgan), a mysterious teenager with too many admirers. In need of a new life and haunted by his past, all Jean wants is to disappear, but can he leave the only person who has made him happy to a disastrous fate? Lauded as one of Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s finest films, Port of Shadows explores the fog-shrouded zone between past and future, life and death, and the (im)possibility of escape and established the genre of poetic realism.