Smoke and Flowers

Le jour se leve - Marcel Carne. Jean Gabin, making a middle out of the margin. The central outsider, his mouth muscular from keeping those sharp lips pursed, he is the taciturn trumpeter of self-integrity. Helped by the frame of the screen, and the will of the eye to encompass, he defines the surrounding order, flushes it out, through a strongheaded opposition. The cinema of poetic realism is a cinema of resistance, of the misunderstood murderer, who killed to battle corruption.