L'air De Paris

The 1954 French film L'Air de Paris, ¹ with major stars (Jean Gabin, Arletty) and a distinguished director (Marcel Carné), features a love story between men and much homo-erotic display (Figure 9. 1). It stands out as a neglected early example of an explicitly homosexual mainstream feature film. Yet, as André Bazin suggested at the time, it is also a film that feels ‘out of kilter, disoriented, and somehow untrue to itself’. ² I want to explore here what made such a relatively daring film possible but also the way that the terms in which it was possible also produce the uneasy feeling identified by Bazin.