In Le Jour se lève (1939), Jean Gabin played François, a foundry worker who, barricaded in his room after shooting a man, remembers in flashback the love and jealousy that brought him there. Directed by Marcel Carné, the film is a masterpiece of poetic realism, and Gabin’s François is its doomed, tender hero.
François is an ordinary man caught by passion and by fate, and Gabin plays him with a simplicity that makes his end profoundly moving. The film, released on the eve of war, became a symbol of a France about to be lost, and Gabin’s performance remains one of the great portraits of a working man in French cinema.