Feyder accepted an invitation to work in England for Alexander Korda, for whom he made Knight Without Armour (1937), but made it possible for Carné to take over his project, Jenny (1936), as its director. The film marked the beginning of a successful collaboration with surrealist poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. This collaborative relationship lasted for more than a dozen years, during which Carné and Prévert created their best remembered films. Together, they were involved in the poetic realism film movement of fatalistic tragedies; Ginette Vincendeau said that “the movement’s greatest classics are probably Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes in 1938 and Le Jour Se Lève in 1939.”

By the 1950s, Carné’s reputation was in eclipse. The critics of Cahiers du cinéma, who became the film makers of the New Wave, dismissed him and placed his films’ merits solely with Prévert. Other than his 1958 hit Les Tricheurs, Carné’s postwar films met with only uneven success and many were greeted by an almost unrelenting negative criticism from the press and within members of the film industry. In 1958, Carné was the Head of the Jury at the 6th Berlin International Film Festival. His 1971 film Law Breakers was entered into the 7th Moscow International Film Festival. Carné made his last film in 1976.

Marcel Carné died in 1996 in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.