Critics reviews

If Hotel du Nord has a lighter tone and less fatalistic outlook than other poetic realist films by Marcel Carné, this is probably because the script is not by Carné's most famous collaborator, Jacques Prévert, but by Henri Jeanson. I saw the film with a French friend, who kept laughing when I couldn't see anything funny in the subtitles: he told me afterwards that the dialogue is filled with salty old Parisian slang.

The end result is a kind of French melodrama in which the abiding tone is resigned futility, albeit with an irresistible glow of poetry in sound and image that leaves one exhilarated rather than drained.

While it may lack Prévert's acerbic edge, it is a masterpiece of production design and performance, as exemplified by the fidelity of Trauner's sets and Arletty's role as the ‘tart with the heart'. Like Le quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord resonates with themes of imprisonment, disillusionment and the impossibility of escape.

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.