A 1939 French Film That Opens, as a Good Noir Should, With a Dead Body

Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939) belongs to Poetic Realism, the French tradition that flourished in the 1930s. Senses of Cinema's critic notes that watching it makes it easy to see how American films noir ended up with a French name at all — a remark about lineage rather than a claim that this one film explains the term. The craft point is smaller and firmer: the film begins the way the critic says a good noir should, with a corpse, and then moves into a scene between two men. Opening on a body is not just shock. It hands the viewer a question — who, and why — and lets the rest of the film work backward from an outcome the audience already knows.