Le Jour se Leve

M. Valentin

Clara

La concierge

Le concierge (as Genin)

Mr. Gerbois (as Arthur Devere)

Le patron du café (as Bergeron)

Gaston

Paulo (as Peres)

La chanteuse

La vieille dame dans l'escalier

Le commissaire

Françoise

Une locataire (uncredited)

(uncredited)

L'aveugle (uncredited)

(uncredited)

Un agent (uncredited)

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Un agent (uncredited)

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(uncredited)

(uncredited)

(uncredited)

(uncredited)

Un agent (uncredited)

Un agent (uncredited)

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While not the first film to use dissolves to represent flashbacks, it was considered too new a method in the language of cinema that the films producers' insisted on pretitle cards to avoid any confusion.

This film was released in June 1939, only a year before France's surrender to the Nazis, who subsequently occupied the country. Although this film has no overt political content, according to film scholar Roy Armes, the scene in which the crowd on the street below expresses solidarity with the trapped François - which he rejects, shouting that he only wants to be left alone - reflected the political despair of the period, "a chilling epilogue to a brief period which had opened with the enthusiasms aroused by the Popular Front." [French Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 102] In validation of this view, the government of Vichy (unoccupied France) shortly afterwards banned the film as "demoralizing," as if it had been partly responsible for France's defeat.

With RKO's 1947 remake, The Long Night (1947), the Studio tried to have all original prints of Le jour se lève destroyed.

M. Valentin: You're the type women fall in love with . . . I'm the type that interests them.