Under the Roofs of Paris

René Clair's first sound film and the first French production of the sound era to find an international audience. The film follows a street singer, Albert, and his rival for the affections of a Romanian woman named Pola, through the tenements and alleys of a working-class Paris neighborhood. Clair used sound sparingly, letting long stretches play silent and bringing in music and noise at moments that heighten the image rather than replace it. The opening crane shot down from the rooftops to the street singer, with the title song swelling on the soundtrack, is one of the great entrances of early sound cinema. The film is a defense of silent-film technique at the moment the medium was turning to talk. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.