Filmmaker Marcel Carné’s (Children of Paradise) charming 1938 ensemble dramedy Hotel du Nord opens with a bubbling dinner party at the titular Parisian hotel/restaurant, where a young girl is being feted after her First Communion. The tenants/guests happily engage in light banter and mildly sexually-tinged jokes while enjoying a hearty meal, and only later are members of the company revealed to include a female prostitute, a gay man, a philanderer, a cuckold, and an adulteress. Of course, if this had been a Hollywood production during the late 1930s, none of these characters would have been welcome at the table (and if they were, they certainly wouldn’t be having fun).
Made two years prior to the Nazi occupation of France, Hotel du Nord presents scenes of normality before the coming storm(troopers), although the action is anything but calm. The dinner at the hotel is interrupted by the arrival of a young couple—Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont)—who take a room and then (in a doomed lovers' suicide pact) try to take their lives. Only the plan falters—Pierre’s shot at Renée is not fatal and he gets cold feet and makes an escape, only to turn himself into the police later. When Renée recovers, she tries to reestablish a connection with the imprisoned Pierre, but his guilt and shame won’t allow it.
Returning to the hotel for her personal belongings, Renée is offered a job as a maid, which she accepts, coming into contact with more of the hotel’s denizens, including streetwalker Raymonde (Arletty), pimp Edmond (Louis Jouvet), and Prosper (Bernard Blier) and Ginette Trimault (Paulette Dubost), the latter having an affair with Kenel (Andrex—yes, the French like their mono-named stars). When Prosper protests about Ginette going for a ride with Kenel, the latter responds, “What could we do in my truck? I’m not into complicated stuff” (dialogue that never would have made it past a Hollywood censor).
In the film’s most famous exchange, Edmond goes for a Sunday stroll with Raymonde along the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin (elaborately recreated on a studio lot). Having set his sights on Renée, Edmond tells Raymonde, “I need a change of atmosphere, and the atmosphere in question is you.” Raymonde’s response—“Do I look like someone’s at-mos-phè-re?”—if the last word is correctly mispronounced—still raises a laugh amongst older French cinemagoers.
Carné’s heightened style applied to ordinary subject matter has been termed “poetic realism,” a phrase used to describe much of the acclaimed director’s work. He was influenced by the German expressionists and it shows here in his use of light and shadow in what is essentially a slice-of-life portrait of working-class pre-war Parisians.
Presented with a 2K digital restoration, extras include a new conversation between filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and journalist Philippe Morisson, a 1972 “making-of” TV program, a 1994 documentary on the life and career of director Marcel Carné, and a leaflet with an essay by film and theater scholar Edward Baron Turk.
An entertaining, refreshingly inclusive, and charmingly saucy character study, Hotel du Nord is recommended for classic film collections in public libraries.