Hôtel du Nord: The Atmosphere in Question

Carné negotiated the funding for Hôtel du Nord with Joseph Lucachevitch, who was eager to produce a homegrown showcase for Annabella, then a huge box-office draw in France and central Europe. Annabella had by that time secured a Hollywood contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and begun a romance with actor Tyrone Power, which, despite studio mogul Darryl F. Zanuck’s noisy opposition, would further enhance her international profile. Carné was not much of an Annabella fan. However, he had been impressed by her performance in René Clair’s populist romantic drama Quatorze juillet (1933), and since Lucachevitch was giving Carné carte blanche for choice of subject, he agreed to cast her as the female lead in an adaptation of one of his favorite novels, Eugène Dabit’s L’Hôtel du Nord. Dabit’s book, which in 1931 had won the first Prix Populiste, derives from the author’s boyhood memories of the colorful occupants of the real-life Hôtel du Nord, situated at 102 quai de Jemmapes in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, which had been proudly owned and run by Dabit’s parents. (Its exterior still stands at that address and remains a tourist attraction.) In a 1933 article written for Cinémagazine, “When Will the Camera Get Out into the Street?,” Carné praised Dabit for portraying in words “the hidden soul” of life along the Canal Saint-Martin, and hoped French cinema would follow the leads of Dabit and his fellow populist novelists André Thérive and Bernard Nabonne by homing in on “the simple life of humble people.” Carné’s eagerness to adapt Dabit’s novel also derived from his desire to present on-screen a social configuration missing from his previous pictures: a warm, close-knit, albeit surrogate family. (When Carné was five years old, his mother died of pneumonia; his father entrusted the boy’s upbringing to doting relatives. Still, as Carné confided in conversation with me, his having been deprived of authentic maternal care may well account for the depictions in almost all his films of love as ephemeral and liable to cause pain.)

As planning for Hôtel du Nord took shape, and in conformity with the era’s protocols for mainstream filmmaking, Carné and his crew did not exactly “get out into the street.” The movie’s only location footage, depicting actual barges passing through the canal’s locks, appears in the opening credit sequence and in certain transitions between plot episodes. Nevertheless, one of the film’s many pleasures is the stunning impression of physical reality it evokes. This seductive illusionism results from Carné’s bold decision to have his production designer, Alexandre Trauner, reconstruct, on a back lot of the Boulogne-Billancourt studios, not only the facades of the actual Hôtel du Nord and its neighbors but also a sizable stretch of the canal itself, thus capturing the neighborhood’s sweep as well as its details. This tour de force brought the production a good deal of prerelease publicity, and it would stand as the most dazzling (and expensive) Carné-Trauner achievement until the awe-inspiring urban street decor they conceived for Children of Paradise (1945). As in other major Carné films, Hôtel du Nord’s material environment—for all its credibility—also amplifies our identification with the main characters’ inner states of being. Essential to the film’s visual texture is its insistence on the tubular channels, dams, and crisscrossed footpaths of the canal; the narrow corridors and compartments of the hotel; the iron beds, barred windows, and glass-paned interior walls of the hospital; the passageways, catwalks, and mesh grilles of the prison. These omnipresent signs of constriction register as tangible evidence of the barely articulated need among Carné’s hapless main characters for a replenished spirit or, more figuratively put, for a less polluted societal at-mos-phè-re.

Between 1936 and 1950, the poet-scenarist Jacques Prévert supplied the screenplay and/or dialogue for every film Carné released—except Hôtel du Nord. Carné hoped his tried-and-true collaborator would also adapt Dabit’s novel since, like the director, Prévert had working-class roots, and since both men, despite their growing celebrity, identified personally and politically with the so-called common Parisian. They shared a view that the prostitutes and petty criminals of the milieu populaire were mostly victims of economic circumstance and potentially redeemable through a rediscovery of the proletarian virtues of candor and simplicity. But because Prévert was traveling in the United States, Carné turned to Jean Aurenche for the adaptation and Henri Jeanson for the film’s dialogue. Aurenche’s rendition gave priority to the young lovers Renée and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont). At the story’s start, this beleaguered, impoverished couple, who believe that “the world wanted nothing to do with us,” rent a room in the hotel, planning to carry out a double suicide. Yet after shooting Renée, Pierre lacks the fortitude to kill himself and soon surrenders to the police—even though Renée, who was only wounded, has lodged no complaint. By story’s end, the lovers reunite and set out to confront their shaky destinies beyond the confines of the Hôtel du Nord. However, Jeanson—well-known for his smooth-talking wit and charm—convinced producer Lucachevitch that if he were allowed to enlarge the roles of two secondary characters (played by his close friends Arletty and Jouvet), the film would have greater audience appeal. Carné was initially dubious, but Jeanson’s instinct proved right. Consequently, one result of the Carné-Jeanson-Aurenche partnership is that viewers may come away from Hôtel du Nord wondering which of the four lead actors, if any, are the story’s true protagonists. That concern, however, is 
perhaps misplaced.

If Hôtel du Nord is an atypical star vehicle, that is also because much of its narrative richness is grounded in the lively interactions of a varied ensemble of superlative character actors. The roster includes, among others, Paulette Dubost (Ginette, a hairdresser trainee), probably best remembered as the flirtatious chambermaid in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939); Bernard Blier (Prosper, the cuckolded lockkeeper) and François Périer (Adrien, the gay confection salesman), both in early screen roles; and Jane Marken (Louise Lecouvreur, the hotel proprietor’s spouse), in a sort of dress rehearsal for her just as winning portrayal of Madame Hermine, the mother hen in Children of Paradise. Here, Marken keeps nonjudgmental watch over her libidinous tenants’ constant game of musical beds. Her benevolence is also on display in the foster care she and her husband provide—to the chagrin of one xenophobic resident—for a mute youngster, a displaced, traumatized victim of the Spanish Civil War, and in her extending, quite literally, an equal seat at the table to Périer’s character, the first nonclichéd depiction of a queer male in mainstream French cinema. For Carné, who was gay, Adrien functions as simply one more self-confident social outsider in an overall project that would never have been greenlit by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration. In this regard, the story arc of Arletty’s streetwalker intimates a progressive, if limited, take on a woman’s claim to self-assertion and autonomy. It remains uncertain whether Raymonde will keep laboring at what she does best, but in choosing to cohabit with the gentle, attentive Prosper, she plainly renounces slavish dependence on any one man’s brutal “protection.”