Jean Gabin plays a murderer who locks himself in his attic flat, and has until dawn to reconstruct the events that led him to this end.
“The neglect of Marcel Carné is every bit as unreasonable now as the orthodoxy thirty years ago that he was the greatest of French directors. Seen after M. Lange, Le Jour Se Lève is a prediction of film noir in which another Parisian building becomes the site of alienation and siege instead of community. 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? He is far more American a director than Renoir. He strokes self-pity and brilliant malice, victimized good and stylish evil. And so, Jean Gabin and Jules Berry here are stars in the night, representatives of enormous human forces, literary and theatrical characters, instead of those bundles of impulse preferred by Renoir.
“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 Trauner and Jaubert helps to intensify the enclosure of characters set up by Carné's deliberate but very beautiful scheme of close-ups. What emerges is a demonstration of how far the script and the mise-en-scene determine whether a film is ‘about' stars or character actors. Jules Berry is not much different as Valentin or Batala; but the films' regard for him has replaced ambivalence with loathing in our minds.” David Thomson