15th Jun 2025 7pm Studio One
Hôtel du Nord (1938) directed by Michel Carné
Cert PG, Running Time 1h 53m
| Starring Anabella, Jean-Pierrer Aumont, Louis Jouvet. On the meandering Canal St. Martin, at the Parisian Hôtel du Nord, a nearly fatal gunshot separates a dejected young couple. But, amid a sad but beautiful panorama of lively characters, love has the final say. Can life be a fairy tale? Paris-1938. In a hotel near the Canal Saint-Martin, a communion is celebrated. Hotel guests and owners celebrate the event with a meal. During the meal, a young couple of lovers comes to rent a room with the aim of committing suicide. During the night a shot rings out, the young woman is wounded and the young man disappears. The hoteliers then welcome the young woman for her convalescence and hire her as a waitress. Her life will then be intertwined with the life of the hotel and with another truculent couple, a girl and her pimp… Marcel Carné adapted Eugène Dabit’s novel “Hôtel du Nord” for the screen. In fact Eugène Dabit was none other than the son of the owners of the real Hôtel du Nord on the Canal Saint-Martin that still stands today. At that time, the Hôtel was a source of inspiration for the novel, which transcribes the simple lives of ordinary, but “colourful” Parisians. Anguished young lovers, fallen women, wanted criminals, and all manner of social castoffs: these are the disreputable denizens of the Hôtel du Nord, an atmospherically seedy boardinghouse on the bustling banks of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, whose lives collide in Marcel Carné’s bittersweet rhapsody of romance, betrayal, revelry, and violence. Featuring evocative production design by the famed Alexandre Trauner and a colorful ensemble cast of some of classical French cinema’s most illustrious stars—including Annabella, Louis Jouvet, and a divinely dissolute Arletty in one of her most iconic roles—Hôtel du Nord is a jewel of a film and a sublime exemplar of Carné’s celebrated poetics, imbuing working-class lives and dramas with a touching nobility. |