'You Warn Them, but They Won't Listen': A Beggar Called Destiny in Les Portes de la nuit

In the 1946 film Les Portes de la nuit, a beggar named Destiny gets a line that could serve as a motto for fatalistic drama: you warn people and they ignore you; fail to warn them and they blame fate. It's like, the character says, they enjoy having problems, tragedies, complications. Senses of Cinema quotes it as the film's own note of resignation — fitting, since the same piece describes Les Portes de la nuit as marking the end of Prévert-Carné as a productive team. Putting that kind of speech in the mouth of a character literally named Destiny stacks the deck: the film's warning is spoken by the abstraction that supposedly delivers the outcome anyway, which is a neat way to make the audience complicit in the fatalism rather than just observing it.