On the Waterfront

One of the most delicate and sensitive of waterfront fallen woman sagas is Hiroshi Shimizu’s Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933), a silent film from the fruitful period when Japanese cinema held out against the coming of sound. (One of the earliest Japanese talkies was Yasujiro Shimazu’s First Steps Ashore [1932], a reworking of Docks of New York set in Yokohama; Japan continued to produce silent films until the late 1930s. Japanese Girls opens with a pan around a broad harbor, smoke pouring from the funnels of ocean liners, flags snapping on riggings and confetti streamers billowing as a ship sets sail. Two schoolgirls in sailor-collared uniforms watch from a hillside. “I feel sad watching ships leave the port,” one says. “All Yokohama girls feel that way,” the other replies.

As the camera smoothly tracks them along their daily walks from school, the two friends pledge their loyalty, but a rift soon appears when Sunako (Michiko Oikawa) abandons Dora (Yukiko Inoue) to run off with the motorcycle-riding Henry (Ureo Egawa). And when Sunako realizes her boyfriend is seeing another woman, she shoots her rival—in a church, no less—and begins a drifting life as a dance-hall hostess. Years later she returns to Yokohama, where Dora and Henry are now married, and not quite intentionally lures the weak-willed Henry away from his wife. Shimizu tells this complex melodrama through a series of elegant stylistic devices, like the gliding shots of women walking in pairs, a motif picked up by lovely scenes of Sunako and her fellow B-girl Masumi (Yumeko Aizome) strolling along the waterfront with parasols. When Sunako confronts her rival, the camera moves in on her in a staccato sequence of jump cuts, repeated at the end in a climactic recognition scene. At times, rather than exiting the frame, characters simply fade out; in a witty moment, Sunako’s dance-hall boss says, “I guess I’m in the way. I’ll get lost,” then dissolves as he is walking toward the door.

But while these flourishes are exciting, they never distract from the humanism of the story; all of the flawed characters are treated with clear-eyed tenderness. Oikawa’s expressive performance minutely details Sunako’s internal struggle between jealousy and loyalty, the guilt and insecurity under her hard-boiled pose. Even the secondary characters are striking individuals. Lanky, bashful Tatsuo Saito plays a bearded, beret-sporting painter who tags along with Sunako, his unrequited obsession leading him to accept the humiliating role of a servant—at one point, he dons a frilly apron and does her laundry. Masumi is even more intriguing, a beautiful tough cookie who smiles sweetly while biting off lines like “Life is short, but troubles are endless.” She has some kind of shady hustle, perhaps a blackmail scheme, and when the police show up she makes a stylish exit, shrugging, “Crime doesn’t pay!”

Masumi recalls Olga Baclanova’s character in Docks of New York, another lady of the pavements who takes care of Mae after her plunge. When her no-good husband is found dead in Mae’s room, she steps up gallantly: “I shot him, and no one else is going to get the credit for it.” In Port of Call, there is Gertrude, Berit’s more jaded, bad-girl pal from the reformatory, who turns to her for help after a botched, illegal abortion. These friends serve as a warning to the heroines, an illustration of the perils of the wrong path, but they are also charismatic figures of female defiance in a world grossly stacked against them. “I hope you have better luck than me,” Baclanova says as she climbs into a police wagon, “but I doubt it.”

Pessimism drifts through all these films, but nowhere is it thicker, or more romantically savored, than in Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s Port of Shadows (1938). On a barren spit of land overlooking the industrial docks, a weathered shack (“Chez Panama”) provides a haven for washed-up outcasts, including a suicidal painter and a drunk whose eternally thwarted dream is to sleep once between clean sheets. Jean (Jean Gabin), a soldier who has deserted the colonial army, puts it simply: “Life’s a bitch,” he tells the beautiful young Nelly (Michèle Morgan) while taking her to a carnival on a date. The next morning, as they linger in a hotel room where they have shared one perfect night, a newspaper brings word that Jean is wrongly suspected of murder. Fatalism itself, he shrugs: “If it weren’t this, it would be something else.”

When Jean first materializes out of the fog on the road to Le Havre, he is a bone-weary figure of defeat whose cool fatigue gives way to sudden eruptions of fury. In the back room at Panama’s he sees Nelly, a slender, luminous-eyed vision in a beret and a shimmering plastic raincoat, at once severely glamorous and heartbreakingly vulnerable. He assumes—understandably, given the location—that she is a prostitute, but she is actually taking refuge from her creepy guardian, Zabel (Michel Simon), a sanctimonious hypocrite who can’t keep his hands off her. When Jean later confronts Zabel, he explodes with all-encompassing rage: “Every time something good happens, filth like you come along and ruin it.”

Mournfully watching the sun rise over the ocean or sitting on a wharf looking at the trash bobbing in the water, Gabin and Morgan share an entrancing, seductive melancholy beside which happiness seems crass and unattractive. Perhaps only the French can pull this off. Jean and Nelly’s fleeting idyll falls victim to violent envy and stupid muddles—this is the realism part, grafted to the poetic style of Prévert’s dialogue, Alexandre Trauner’s moody sets, and Eugen Schüfftan’s smoky, soft-focus camerawork, in which shadows look like charcoal blended by fingertip. On top of it all is Maurice Jaubert’s somber, dirgelike score, which soars above a merciless final shot of the ocean liner that was supposed to carry Jean to safety sailing out of the harbor without him.

Poetic realism is a form in which two elements meet and mingle in a border space where sharp distinctions are dissolved. Waterfronts make such fertile locations for drama because they are regions of fluidity and ambiguity, of transit and impermanence, where many things meet and separate. Plots and motifs, themes and images migrate from one country to another, one era to the next, turning up in another film like a sailor in a new port. Filmmakers, actors, and technicians circulate too: Schüfftan went from developing special effects processes for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in Germany to crafting the sfumato look of Port of Shadows to lensing Edgar G. Ulmer’s Paris-set B noir Bluebeard (1944) to winning a best-cinematography Oscar for Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961).

It is no wonder that film noir, most at home in the murk and on the edge, always gravitated to waterfronts. Where the sea meets the city, the familiar meets the unfathomable. The depths that start somewhere off the docks are a reminder: it is easy to get in over your head.