Julien Duvivier (8 October 1896, Lille – 29 October 1967, Paris) was a French film director. He was prominent in French cinema in the years 1930-1960. He created a world of dark images born of a strange imagination. After the Second World War, he gave a pessimistic representation of French society, showing it as being dominated by hypocrisy, narrow clericalism, meanness and women's slyness. Amongst his most original films, chiefly notable are Pépé le Moko, Panique and Voici le temps des assassins. Notwithstanding his being celebrated for his darkness, he enjoyed great success with his Don Camillo films, starring Fernandel.
Early years
It was as an actor, in 1916 at the Théâtre de l'Odéon under the direction of Andre Antoine, that Duvivier's career began. In 1918 he moved on to Gaumont, as a writer and assistant of, amongst others, André Antoine, Louis Feuillade and Marcel L'Herbier. In 1919 he directed his first film. In the 1920s several of his films had a religious concern; - Credo ou la tragédie de Lourdes, L'abbé Constantin and La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin - a film about the Carmelite saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Duvivier's filmography, however, never remained confined to a single theme, or even a particular style.
The 1930s, his golden years
In the 1930s Duvivier was part of the production company, 'Film d'Art', founded by Marcel Vandal and Charles Delac and he worked as part of a team. He stayed with them for nine years. David Golder, made in 1930, was his first success. It was also his first 'talkie' , as it was of the actor Harry Baur. They worked together many more times in the 1930s. In 1934 Duvivier collaborated with Jean Gabin for the first time in the film Maria Chapdelaine. In 1935, for La Bandera, he availed himself of the writing talent of Charles Spaak, who had previously worked with Jacques Feyder, Jean Gremillon, Marc Allégret and Marcel L'Herbier. They too would work together many times from this point onwards. Having made Golem (1936), a remake of an earlier German horror film, Duvivier set out on La belle équipe, with Jean Gabin, Charles Vanel and Raymond Aimos. The film remains key to his work. Five unemployed men hit the lottery jackpot and decide to buy a seaside café/dance hall together. The unexpected however, keeps happening. Once jealousy over a woman, Gina, (Viviane Romance), gets mixed up with the venture, there is little left to save. The original ending of the film involving a killing, was judged too pessimistic, and another, happier ending, was filmed. It was the happier version that was released, though both versions still exist. L'Homme du jour (1936), with Maurice Chevalier in the lead role is a minor work in the director's canon but Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal are incontestable summits.
Pépé le Moko which plunges into the midst of the gangster underworld, and which had the Casbah (Arab quarter) of Algiers for exotic backdrop, was the film which propelled Jean Gabin into the category of an international star. In 1938 Duvivier signed a contract with MGM and made his first American film, a biopic of Johann Strauss, The Great Waltz. The next year, back in France, he made La Fin du Jour, in which theatre actors in retirement struggle to see that their retirement home remains open. Michel Simon played an old ham actor, and Louis Jouvet, an old leading actor who still believes in his seductive powers. La Charrette fantôme followed, a horror film adapted from a novel by Selma Lagerlof. In 1940 Untel père et fils, a family history starring Raimu, Michèle Morgan, and Jouvet, was not able to be shown - because of the political situation - until the end of the war, at least in France. It is generally considered a minor work, and even a failure.
The War, his American period
During the Second World War, unlike Marcel Carné most notably, Duvivier left to work in the United States. He made 5 films in these years. Lydia; two anthology films, Tales of Manhattan with Charles Boyer and Rita Hayworth amongst other stars, and Flesh and Fantasy with Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer and Barbara Stanwyck; The Impostor, a remake of Pépé le Moko and again with Jean Gabin; and Destiny, (1944), a Reginald Le Borg film to which Duvivier contributed uncredited.
After the War
On his return to France, Duvivier experienced some difficulties in resuming his career. In 1946, Panique, an exhaustive summary of the lowest of human instincts, was the most personal, darkest, and nihilistic of his works. It was a bitter failure - with critics and the public. Duvivier continued, notwithstanding, to work in France until the end of his life, (after a short detour to Great Britain in 1948 to shoot Anna Karenina and to Spain for Black Jack in 1950.) In 1951 he made Sous le ciel de Paris, a highly original film from the point of view of the way the film was cut. In the course of a day in Paris one follows people whose paths will cross. The same year Duvivier shot the first of the humorous Don Camillo films from the Giovanni Guareschi books, Le Petit monde de Don Camillo. It met with immediate popular success and he followed its success with Le Retour de Don Camillo in 1953. The series continued with other directors. In 1956's Voici le temps des assassins, Jean Gabin played a decent restaurateur in Les Halles who is swindled by a cynical young woman, Catherine, (Danièle Delorme). In 1959 he made Marie-Octobre with Danielle Darrieux, Serge Reggiani, and Bernard Blier amongst others. It was an exercise in style; 11 people, 9 men, 2 women, and a mise en scène that followed the unities of time, place, and action, it had a constant concern for the framing of the composition to reinforce an inquisitorial, menacing atmosphere. The same year he was invited to be part of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, 1959, the year the Nouvelle Vague emerged.
In 1962 Duvivier made a final anthology film, Le Diable et les dix Commandements, and in 1963 Chair de Poule, a film whose scenario has resemblances with The Postman Always Rings Twice and which again features an unscrupulous woman. In 1967, just as the production of Diaboliquement vôtre reached completion, a film about a man made amnesiac folllowing a car accident, Duvivier, himself, was in a traffic accident, triggering a heart attack which killed him. He was 71; he left behind a filmography comprising nearly 70 films. He is buried in the cemetery of Rueil-Malmaison in the Hauts-de-Seine.
Filmography
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