Gates of the Night

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shortly after the city’s postwar liberation. It’s there that Jean Diego (Yves Montand in one of his first film roles), a former member of the French underground Resistance, has an encounter with destiny as he meets a long-lost comrade, villains of the war, a prophetic tramp, and a beautiful woman who will draw him into an inexorable tragedy. A richly allegorical evocation of a country reckoning with the guilt and national trauma of World War II and the occupation, LES PORTES DE LA NUIT (“The Gates of the Night”) was a tough sell for postwar audiences looking for escapism, but it can now be appreciated for both its haunting atmosphere and unique fusion of poetic fantasy and bitter reality.