When Nelly finds out that her godfather killed Maurice out of jealousy, she uses the information to blackmail him and prevent him from telling the police that Jean is a deserter.

At the last minute Jean leaves the ship to say goodbye to Nelly; he saves her from the hands of Zabel, whom he kills, but when they go out on to the street he is shot in the back by Lucien and dies in her arms.

Gabin—eating sausage with a knife or talking around a cigarette butt parked in the corner of his mouth or administering a backhanded slap to Brasseur—is the quintessential French tough guy, as iconic a figure as Bogart playing Sam Spade.

The hazy lights, the wet cobblestones, the prehensile poplars lining the road out of town, the philosophical gravity of peripheral characters, the idea that nothing in life is more important than passion—such things defined a national cinema that might have been dwarfed by Hollywood in terms of reach and profit but stood every inch as tall as regards grace and beauty and power.

The ragged outlines, the lowdown settings, the romantic fatalism of the protagonists, the movement of the story first upward toward a single moment of happiness and then down to inexorable doom—the hallmarks of the style had germinated in some form or other through the decade, but in Marcel Carné's third feature they came together as archetypes.

Before July 2004,[6] Criterion Collection gave the film a "bare-bones" release, with a booklet and limited on-screen special features; according to James Steffen of Turner Classic Movies, the DVD's "high-definition transfer does justice to Carné, Schufftan and Trauner's richly detailed vision", though there are issues because of the "highly variable" quality of the 35mm film used: "Within the same scene some shots can be startlingly clear, while others are very grainy and have much weaker contrast and detail.