Hôtel du Nord

A very likeable film, but for once denied a Jacques Prévert script, Carné's 'poetic realism' seems a trifle thin and hesitant in this populist yarn about a sleazy Parisian hotel and its inhabitants. While the sad young lovers (Annabella, Aumont) defy their jobless future in a suicide pact, Arletty and Jouvet run cynically away with the film as a pair of hardbitten rogues. But the real star is Trauner, whose studio sets - the mournful canal bank, the little iron bridge, the shabby rooms - are as amazingly evocative as Maurice Jaubert's score.