THE death last week of Marcel Carne at the age of 90, removes the last great figure of what many cineastes regard as the golden age of French cinema, a period that lasted from the 1930s through the war and into the late 1940s.
Carne was the son of a Parisian cabinet maker; after a period as a woodcarver when he took classes in photography and film technique, he managed to get taken on as assistant to Jacques Feyder, the Belgian director. With Feyder he worked on a number of highly regarded films, including La Kermesse Heroique in 1930, in which same year he also assisted Rene Clair on Sous Les Toits De Paris. He also wrote criticism in film magazines and made a documentary about working class Parisians on holiday.
He got the chance to be a director when Feyder went to England to work on a film with, Marlene Dietrich in 1930. Carne chose the surrealist poet screenwriter Jacques Prevert to write the script, entitled Jenny, and although it was not particularly successful it was the beginning of what was to become one of the cinema's greatest partnerships.
In 1937 they made the farcical Drole De Drame, which marked the advent of another of Carne's long term collaborators, the Hungarian born designer Alexander Trauner. The films that followed, including Quai Des Brumes, Hotel Du Nord and Le Jour Se Leve, were among his greatest. They are characterised by a dark, brooding quality and tell stories of doomed lovers, allowed only brief moments of happiness. They are notable, too, for great performances by the likes of Michele Morgan, Louis Jouvet and, particularly, the unforgettable Jean Gabin.
With the German occupation Carne, unlike such directors as Renoir, Clair and Feyeder, opted to stay in France. In 1942 he made Les Visiteurs Du Soir, a costume drama set in the 15th century, perhaps a safe choice of period given the times that were in it. Astonishingly, though, the film that is generally regarded as his masterpiece, Les Enfants Du Paradis, was also made in those years. The story of an actress in Paris in the 1840s and the four men who love her - a mime, an actor, a criminal, and an aristocrat - it has a sweep and size to it that make it hard to credit that it was created in a time of war, with shortages and frequent stoppages to filming.
After the war things went downhill for Carne. His friend and star the actress Arletty was imprisoned because of her war time love affair with a German officer, and the director himself was publicly rebuked for continuing to work in occupied France and Vichy. Worst of all, his collaboration with Prevert came to an end and, though he was to make many other films and have some lesser successes, he began to look like yesterday's man.
The films he made had always been carefully scripted, rehearsed and studio bound. The advent of the New Wave directors of the 1950s, with their freewheeling camera work and frequently ad libbed dialogue, made Carne look old fashioned and cold. It was even suggested by some of the newcomers that the real creator of his films was Prevert, though it now seems more likely that theirs was one of those comings together of temperamentally very different men that result in a special chemistry. Certainly neither of them did much that was memorable after they parted.
At the end of his life Carne's reputation, underwent a resurrection and he received many honours and awards, providing him with some consolation for the long decline of the latter half of his career. Les Enfants Du Paradis was voted the best French film of the first 100 years of cinema by the French Film academy and, looking at it again, it is hard to quibble, with the verdict. In its scope, its passion and its masterly narration it is reminiscent of one of the great novels of the 19th century and it will surely stand as one of the major works of art of our own.
