“Could you kill me?” asks Marta Manfredini (Isa Miranda) of the fugitive she loves (Jean Gabin) in René Clément’s Le Mura di Malapaga (US: The Walls of Malapaga). Technically the first winner of the (honorary at the time) Academy Award for best foreign language film, it’s a crime melodrama set in the hellish postwar ruins of Genoa, and its joint Italian and French provenance beautifully blends the magic of French poetic realism with the grittiness of Italian neorealism. Having murdered his girlfriend back in France, Pierre Arrignon (Gabin) stows away and disembarks a ship in Genoa to seek treatment for his toothache. While on land, he meets a precocious little girl named Cecchina (Vera Talchi) and her mother Marta (Miranda), who is avoiding her criminal ex-husband (Andrea Checchi) and working in a diner; Pierre and Marta fall in love instantly, but the police are on Pierre’s tail and will soon have him cornered. The gloom of lost souls paints every frame of the film, the rubble on Genoa’s streets an apt symbol of the characters’ hopelessness (Cecchina’s trek through a secret, bombed-out tunnel is like a journey to nothingness), relieved only momentarily by a kiss or a kind word. Clément uses high angles, distant sounds, and chiaroscuro lighting to establish the threat that is city life at night, surrounded by abject poverty; Marta’s beautifully strained face is housed in a grimy, filthy apartment building, a former convent where even chickens and cats fight over food.