The film of Hôtel du Nord was inspired by a book written in 1928 by Eugene Dabit, a gifted young writer who died in 1936 in tragic and mysterious circumstances. Dabit’s L’Hôtel du Nord is a collection of anecdotes about a hotel’s motley collection of working-class residents and its neighbourhood, and a tribute to Dabit’s parents who owned the real Hôtel du Nord. Awarded the Prix populiste in 1929, it records and celebrates the ‘little people’ of this north-eastern Parisian area. Marcel Carné kept both the location and the characters (using some of their names). However, with scriptwriter Jean Aurenche and dialogue-writer Henri Jeanson (Jacques Prévert being unavailable), he created a quartet of characters – Raymonde and Edmond, Renée and Pierre – who both stood for and stood out of that community, and who made the fortune of the film.
Today, Arletty (playing Raymonde) seems to be the star of Hôtel du Nord, but it was Annabella (Renée) who was the top French female star of the period. It was she who made the project possible, even though Carné had achieved prominence with Le Quai des brumes, released earlier that same year. She came back from Hollywood especially to take the part, and her role in Hôtel du Nord is a French view of Hollywood stardom. She is pure image. A stunning beauty, Annabella walks into the hotel like an alien. Even as a maid, she is glamorous – glossy lips, plucked eyebrows, impeccably groomed hair. In the scenes where she and Pierre talk suicide, the dialogue is bland and the argument existential doom and, nominally, poverty – seems forced. This could be because, as Carné claims in his memoirs, Jeanson deliberately sabotaged their lines because he disliked Annabella. At the same time, though, Carné frames them with hauntingly beautiful shots: overhead views of their heads on the bed, or the well-known image of them looking out of the window.
If Annabella is a codified vision of evanescent femininity, the life and zest of the film and ‘the people’ reside in Arletty’s Raymonde. From the lowest cliché – the tart with a golden heart – Arletty creates an unforgettable woman. This is partly because Jeanson gives her his best lines but also because of her electrifying performance, just as the brilliant Jouvet makes Edmond more than a mere pimp. Where Renée is all death drive, Raymonde is life-embracing. When Edmond drops her, instead of killing herself, she moves in with Prosper (Bernard Blier, as one of the first of a long line of cuckolds).
Arletty gives Raymonde the unique mixture of beauty, intelligence and risqué humour which had made her such a success on stage, while her peerless voice is unforgettable. Renée and Pierre are visually glamorous, but Raymonde and Edmond form a great vocal duet Jouvet’s fatalistic drawl is a perfect foil for Arletty’s high-pitched squeaks and Parisian slang, immortalised in the ‘Atmosphère!, atmosphère!’ scene where the two argue on the bridge over the canal. The lines have become part of French folklore, and when Arletty launched a perfume late in life for charity it was called Atmosphère.
In the Carné canon, Hôtel du Nord is usually eclipsed by Le Quai des brumes, Le Jour se lève (1939) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945), largely because of Prévert’s absence. Jeanson’s dialogue is indeed broader, the film more comic. In this respect, Hôtel du Nord is ‘theatrical realism’ rather than ‘poetic realism’. But in the interaction of set, camerawork and Maurice Jaubert’s restrained, moody music, Hôtel du Nord is typical of poetic realism. Its poetry is embodied in the superb set designed by Alexandre Trauner, a replica of one side of the Canal Saint-Martin, complete with bridges, punctuated by location shots of the canal and barges. The set is plainly artificial, yet still a microcosm of Paris which we enter with the young couple, the camera following them down the side of the bridge. (A reverse of this movement takes us out at the end of the film.)
Graham Greene, who loved French cinema for knowing ‘the immense importance of the careful accessory’, once wrote: ‘in Hôtel du Nord we believe in the desperate lovers and the suicide pact on the brass bed in the shabby room, just because of the bicyclists on the quay, the pimp quarrelling with his woman in another room, and the First-Communion party.’
Hôtel du Nord was shot during the Munich crisis and Carné lost technicians and cast members as they were drafted. Yet the resulting film is less historically grounded (and less bleak) than Dabit’s novel. Social events such as strikes are a faint echo, as is the international situation (a young Spanish refugee is marginal to the story). Carné was more daring on the gender front. Characters may take the hackneyed appearance of pimps and prostitutes, but they are free of conventional morality. Edmond and Renée’s brief interlude is clearly sexual. When it is over (and although Edmond is smitten), they both shrug it off without guilt Adrien is a (for the time) rare sympathetic portrayal of a gay character. According to Edward Baron Turk, one scene (cut from most prints) shows a male resident molesting a child.
But Hôtel du Nord had a positive social role in an unexpected way. Dabit’s novel ends bitterly: the hotel is demolished by speculators. Carné’s film, on the other hand, prevented the real Hôtel du Nord from being demolished. It is now a restaurant in what has become, alas, a fashionable area, offering ‘traditional French food’ and a show bearing the inevitable title Atmosphère! Atmosphère!
Ginette Vincendeau, Sight and Sound, March 1999
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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