One of the finest examples of French poetic realist cinema, Marcel Carné’s fatalist classic offers up the dead ends, despair, and thwarted love of most American film noirs, with a mood-drenched romanticism contributed by poet Jacques Prévert and a sense of doom contributed by historical circumstances. (It was one of the last French films made before Germany’s invasion of France.) Jean Gabin is an honest sod of a working man, barricaded in his boardinghouse hovel with only some cigarettes, a gun, a teddy bear, and a dream of love while he waits for daybreak—and an inevitable police assault.