Continuing with our highlighting of French cinema gems is Hôtel du Nord, a 1938 film directed by Marcel Carné (Le Quai des brumes, Le jour se lève).

The film centers around the inhabitants of a Paris hotel and a failed murder/suicide. Hôtel du Nord is part of the French Poetic Realism movement of the 1930s. At the heart of poetic realism is sadness and tragedy and these films are considered to be one of the influences of the later film noir style. It's influence continued in Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave movement.

Hôtel du Nord is rightly considered to be proto-Noir and the reasons for this will become apparent after you've seen the film.

The film features one of my favorite French actors- Louis Jouvet, who played the Baron in Jean Renoir's 1936 adaptation of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths (Les Bas-fonds) and Inspector Antoine in Henri-Georges Clouzot 's delicious mystery Quai des Orfèvres.

The best-remembered scene in Hôtel du Nord is comic in nature, between Jouvet and the actress known only as Arletty, revolving around the word "atmosphere" but there's so much more to be had in this film, and the film buffs among us shouldn't miss it.

Airing Tuesday, 11/7 at 6:30 AM Eastern.