A shot is heard from an apartment house in a populated working-class faubourg. A man stumbles out, falls dead. His killer shoots again, and the police lay siege until daybreak, giving François (Jean Gabin), locked in his attic flat, until dawn to reconstruct the events which have led him to this end. Alternating between the past narrative (in which Arletty plays a music hall performer who moves in with François), and the present movements of the police as they close in, Le Jour se lève develops its fatalistic tale. As David Thomson has written for PFA, "Carné was a sentimental fatalist, a melodramatic existentialist--but isn't that exactly the mixture of popular art and philosophy that conspired to make film noir?... Le Jour se lève is a testament to dead ends, despair, and suicide. It can never recover from the evil it has glimpsed. The work of (designer) Alexandre Trauner and (composer) Maurice Jaubert helps to intensify the enclosure of characters set up by Carné's deliberate but very beautiful scheme of close-ups."