Martin Roumagnac

New 4K restoration! This tragic postwar romance is a tale of class anxiety and classic Romantic fatalism, run through with a typically French frankness about sex and gender. Jean Gabin is the title character, an unpretentious and proudly working-class building contractor, who falls in love with Marlene Dietrich’s ravishing shopgirl Blanche, quite unaware that she comes trailing a notorious sexual history and attracts the determined ardor of every man she meets. Among her current lovers is a local politician who plans on marrying Blanche once his terminally ill wife dies, but Martin doesn’t care, though it’s clear that the ever-opportunistic Blanche will choose wealth over love, until she doesn't. As the melodrama heats up, Gabin and Dietrich radiate pure matinee charisma, in the only movie these two icons ever made together.