Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean, an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, as acts of both revenge and kindness render him front-page news. Marcel Carné’s (Children of Paradise) film is the archetypal exemplar of pre-war “poetic realism.” Starring Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, and Michel Simon.

“Everything in Jacques Prévert’s script is essential—seemingly throwaway lines loop back to revelations, and shoulder shrugs sum up characters—without sacrificing an overarching, undefinable sense of operatic futility. For these outcasts, life is as heavy and elusive as the fog that never abates in this port town; and the film’s greatness arises from its belief in the transcendence of impermanence, in the immortality of fleeting but true affections. From Gabin’s fatigued magnetism to cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan’s woodcut-worthy attention to texture, this is movie melancholia of the very highest order” —Time Out Film.