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An exemplar of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (1939) turns a murder story into an evocative examination of a man trapped by circumstances beyond his control. In the script by Carné's main collaborator Jacques Prévert, Jean Gabin's working-class François shoots a man and holes up in his room, thinking back, in an impeccably structured flashback, to the events that brought him to that moment. Carné's camera does not shy away from the desperate, claustrophobic details of working-class life, yet the possibility for human connection gives François's existence hope, until the sadistic Valentin intervenes. The play of light and shadows as François waits out the night invests the surroundings' realistic drabness with a poetic sense of doom, matching the implacable fate that awaits the decent, tormented man. Trading on Gabin's image as a strong yet tender-hearted hero, Le jour se lève's François was seen as not just a man condemned by his class and human weakness but also the image of a country about to be overcome by the diabolical outside forces of World War II.