Class outlasts critics
By Michael J. Roberts
“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Duvivier above the entrance. This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet.” ~ Jean Renoir
Of course, any biography of French film director Julien Duvivier should open with the slightly hyperbolic quote from his contemporary and acknowledged master Jean Renoir, to underscore the significance and regard for Duvier in world cinema. It must be acknowledged too that Renoir was writing at the time of Duvivier’s untimely death at the age of 71 in 1967 and the dead director’s international regard was somewhat diminished after 10 years of sniping from some of the Cahier du Cinéma critics, the then current darlings of the cinema world.
Duvivier’s fall from critical grace at least, had been a long time coming in a long and storied career. Born in Lille in 1896 he gravitated to acting before assisting on film shoots during the Great War. He started his directing career in 1919 and proceeded apace - after a decade he was producing startling pieces like Au Bonheur des dames, a fluid realisation of a young girl in a big city fable packed with movement and subtext and full of grand crowd scenes and nuanced smaller moments. He made his first sound film next in 1930, David Golder, a big hit featuring Harry Baur, who he teamed up with again in some of his finest 1930s films, Moon Over Morocco, La Tête d’un homme, Poil de carotte, Golgotha and swiftly became one of the preeminent filmmakers in France, equally able to provide commercial and critical successes.
In the mid-thirties, when France enjoyed a short-lived leftist Government (Socialist Leon Blum’s Popular Front), the arts were an important part of French identity and Duvivier, cynical eye and all, was in the thick of it. Having helped make Jean Gabin a major star with his French Foreign Legion classicLa Bandera, he teamed up again for a wry comment on collectivism, La Belle Équipe, the story of five friends who win the lottery and restore a riverside hotel as a joint business venture. Both films fit the tenor of the times and came to be known as prime examples of Poetic Realism, the ‘movement’ that emerged at the time, bracketed with other French films of the era by Duvivier’s contemporaries like Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, who rattled off masterwork after masterwork under that banner. Gabin and Duvivier then produced their masterpiece and one of the supreme examples of the Poetic Realist canon, the immortal gangster pic, Pépé le Moko.
Where Renoir became known for his humanity and Carné for his doomed romanticism, Duvivier was the cynical one. He followed his gangster triumph with the very different Un Carnet de Bal, a tale of a middle aged woman tracing her dance partners from ball she debuted at nearly 20 years prior. What could have been much lighter under other directors becomes bittersweet and layered under Duvivier’s unblinking gaze. Hollywood noticed and Duvivier was given a big budget MGM film to helm and delivered the slick and successful The Great Waltz, a Johann Strauss biopic.
Duvivier returned to France for two films in 1939, the brilliant La Fin Du Jour with Michael Simon and Louis Jouvet, and The Phantom Carriage with Pierre Fresnay, Marie Bell, Micheline Francey and Jouvet again. Duvivier started filming his next work, The Heart of a Nation, with Michèle Morgan, Raimu and Jouvet in 1940 but the war interrupted and he fled to the USA where he took the film with him and intermittently worked on it over the next few years. In Hollywood he managed to make some successful films like Lydia, a loose remake of Un Carnet De Bal with Merle Oberon, and a couple of portmanteau films like Tales of Manhattan and Flesh and Fantasy, and a surprising and very fine if overlooked English language war film, The Imposter, with his fellow French exile Jean Gabin.
After the war Duvivier returned to a scarred and changed France to produce one his undisputed masterworks, the trenchant and caustic Panique, and was widely castigated by his countrymen for his troubles. The Charles Spaak adaptation of Mr. Hire’s Engagement by Georges Simenon took an incisive look at the fallout from the resistance effort sparing no one, cutting to issues of betrayal, mob persecution, bigotry and cowardice. The work starred the perennial Michel Simon in one of his greatest roles, ably supported by Vivienne Romance and Paul Bernard, but unsurprisingly it failed to find an audience in France and Duvivier was pilloried with the easy slur that he’d sat the war out in the safety of Hollywood.
“I know it is much easier to make films that are poetic, sweet, charming, and beautifully photographed, but my nature pushes me towards harsh, dark and bitter material”. ~ Julien Duvivier
Possibly stung by the backlash, Duvivier only made one film in the next two years and that was in England at Shepperton, a turgid Tolstoy adaptation of Anna Karenina starring Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson. In 1949 Duvivier made The Sinners, returned to English language film with Black Jack, a 1950 fluffy adventure piece starring George Sanders no less, before settling in to a near film-a-year run of only French productions for the rest of the decade.
Regarded as ‘yesterday’s man’ (much like his colleague Jean Gabin), Duvivier had worked on many projects that the public failed to embrace until his 1952 comedy, The Little World of Don Camillo, starring Fernandel. The film was an enormous hit in France and Italy and led to an equally popular sequel in The Return of Don Camillo the following year, also directed by Duvivier. After a run of comedies Duvivier returned to drama with On Trial and then took a surprising step to romance with Marianne of my Youth. If these films looked like ‘jobs of work’ instead of the much yearned for ‘personal cinema’ that the new firebrand critics of Cahiers du Cinéma lauded, then they were set to miss Duvivier’s next masterwork, Deadlier Than The Male, which reunited him with a now mature Jean Gabin. Jacques Rivette and Jean Luc Godard would pour scorn on Duvivier’s 1950's output generally, but Truffaut found some kind words for the film.
“One can sense the control over every aspect (script, mise en scène, acting, image, music, etc.) – control by a filmmaker who has arrived at total confidence in himself and his vocation”. ~ François Truffaut on Deadlier Than The Male
Truffaut recognised the greatness of the film – a blistering take on betrayal and ageing from a master of his craft. Gabin delivers a note perfect update of his earlier work with Duvivier and provides real gravitas to the role of a successful restaurateur in Les Halles who lets his guard down to a young con woman. The film is so alive and authentic it jumps off the screen and Duvivier injects tension and suspense in equal measure that it stands as his late career masterwork. Claude Chabrol and Bertrand Tavernier would become champions of its quality and significance.
The director hardly endeared himself to his haters by making yet another populist comedy with Fernandel, The Man in The Raincoat, and following it with the sin of a literary adaptation, Zola no less, in Pot-Bouille, co-written with Henri Jeanson. Such was Duvivier’s clout that he could attract major stars like Gérard Philipe to the film to keep him a viable commercial quantity. Likewise in 1959 he attracted popular sensation Brigitte Bardot to his next film, The Woman and The Puppet, another adaptation of an 1898 novel and co-written with Jean Aurenche. Although the film was a commercial success it was never one of Duvivier’s favourites and a ready target for the Cahiers wolves.
“Your camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word, you don’t know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is” ~ Jean Luc Godard
Much like Howard Hawks, the Cahiers darling, Duvivier moved from genre to genre and never allowed himself to be categorized easily, and so he confounded expectations and ended the decade by revisiting the controversial French Resistance era with the haunting Marie-Octobre. The fine ensemble cast was led by the luminous Danielle Darrieux and featured several great French and Italian actors in Paul Meurisse, Bernard Blier, Robert Dalban, Serge Reggiani and Lino Ventura in a tense stand-off to find out who amongst them betrayed their beloved leader to the Germans some 15 years prior. Duvivier helped Jacques Robert, the author of the 1948 book on which it is based, to adapt it to screen aided again by Henri Jeanson in creating a dark and brilliant film.
Duvivier completed another six films of mixed subjects and quality before his untimely death in a motor accident in 1967. He worked with Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut’s onscreen ‘self’ in 1960 with Boulevard, in what was the 15 year old’s second film. He made a gritty and vibrant variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice with Highway Pickup, which had the style and energy of a Chabrol and finished with a quirky, if worthy misfire starring Alain Delon, Diabolically Yours, attracting the biggest stars until the end. His unexpected and shocking death didn’t bring about an immediate reassessment of Duvivier’s artistry – that would be decades off, but it gave Renoir pause to deliver his lovely valediction. Duvivier was more modest -
“Genius is just a word; filmmaking is a craft, a tough craft that must be learned. Personally, the more I work, the more I realise how little I know in proportion to the infinite possibilities of cinematic expression”. ~ Julien Duvivier
If Truffaut regarded Renoir as his ‘father’ then Duvivier was an ‘uncle’ surely. Truffaut was in Duvivier’s debt after the older director was at Cannes in 1959 to vote for Truffaut as Best Director for The 400 Blows, giving Truffaut his first signal triumph. The pair had expressed to each other the wish to work together, but Duvivier only got to work with Truffaut’s screen alter ego, C’est la vie. Years later Truffaut wrote -
“When I met Julien Duvivier a little while before his death, and after I had shot my first film, I tried to get him to admit - he was always complaining - that he had had a fine career, varied and full, and that all things considered he had achieved great success and ought to be contented. ‘Sure, I would feel happy ...if there hadn’t been any reviews.” ~ François Truffaut
Julien Duvivier did indeed have a fine career and produced several indelible masterpieces of French Cinema. He was not afraid to explore the dark impulses of humans in all their flawed, contradictory messiness and knew that not every story was a happy ending. Equally he could turn his hand to broad, populist entertainments when necessary to pay the bills and move to the next project. Duvivier’s versatility worked against him when cinema criticism became a blood sport and never fully got his dues while he was alive. Subsequent generations have begun to glean that Renoir was on to something!