silver nitrate notes

Alexandre Trauner Built the Room That Kills Jean Gabin

22 jul 2026

The set for François's room in Le jour se lève (1939) has four walls. That sounds like nothing until you remember that almost no film set in 1939 had four walls, because the fourth one is where the camera and the crew and the lights go. Alexandre Trauner (1906-1993) built the whole box anyway, so that Marcel Carné (1906-1996) could put the camera inside it and turn. The result is that when François paces, the camera has to follow him around rather than watch him from a comfortable distance, and the audience is stuck in the room with him for the length of a siege. The design decision is the film's argument, made before a frame was shot.

The story is a killing and its aftermath, told backwards. François, a foundry worker played by Jean Gabin (1904-1976), shoots a man called Valentin and locks himself in his top-floor apartment. The police fail to shoot their way in and settle down to wait. François smokes, runs out of cigarettes, and remembers: a florist's assistant named Françoise, a dog trainer's assistant named Clara, and a series of small humiliations administered by Valentin that add up to a motive. Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) wrote it from a story by Jacques Viot, and it is the fourth of the Carné and Prévert collaborations, five years before Les Enfants du Paradis, which Trauner also designed.

Four cameramen are credited, which is unusual and slightly confusing in the histories: Curt Courant (1899-1968), Philippe Agostini, André Bac and Albert Viguier. Courant is the one whose fingerprints are easiest to read, a German émigré who had shot for Lang and for Hitchcock and who brings a hard, sculpted key light that sits oddly and productively against the softer French practice of the period. Look at how François is lit in the room as the night goes on. The bulb is a real source in the space, and Courant keeps letting it blow out the near side of Gabin's face while the far side falls away into nothing. By dawn the man is half gone before the gun does anything.

The flashback structure gets cited constantly, and rightly, because it arrives two years before Citizen Kane and does something Welles never quite needed to do. Kane's flashbacks belong to other people, gathered by a reporter. These belong to the man in the room, and they are not evidence, they are the only movement available to a body that cannot go anywhere. Carné cuts into the past on a dissolve through cigarette smoke or through the mirror, and each return to the present finds the room a little more wrecked. The past is where François can still walk around. That is the whole reason the film has a past tense at all.

Jules Berry (1883-1951) plays Valentin as a man who lies for the pleasure of watching the lie work, all fluttering hands and theatrical self-pity, and he is genuinely hard to be in a scene with, which is the point. Arletty (1898-1992) has the best written part as Clara and does the most with the least, a woman who understands the arrangement she is in and refuses to be pitied for it. Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940) scored it, one of his last films before he was killed in the fighting in June 1940, and his cues are notably thin on the ground. Long stretches carry no music at all, just the crowd outside and the boots on the stairs.

Then history did its work on the print. In 1940 the Vichy government banned the film as demoralising, which is an odd charge to bring against a picture that opened in Paris on 9 June 1939 and could hardly have caused the thing it was accused of anticipating. Worse followed: in 1947 RKO acquired the rights in order to remake it as The Long Night, and set about buying up and destroying every copy it could find. For some years the original was feared lost. It came back in the 1950s, and by 1952 it was sitting in the first Sight and Sound ten-best list. StudioCanal's 2014 restoration put back material the censors had removed, including a shot of Arletty undressed.

A man sits in a room he cannot leave while a crowd gathers below and the state waits outside the door. Two governments tried to make the film go away and one studio tried to erase it commercially. Trauner built four walls so the camera could not escape, and then the picture itself spent a decade trying not to be walled in.

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sources
[1] Turk, Edward Baron. Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
[2] Andrew, Dudley. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
[3] Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000.
[4] "The Top Ten Films of All Time." Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, 1952.