JULIEN DUVIVIER

by Lenny Borger

Of all the old masters of the Golden Age of French Cinema swept under the carpet by the young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague, none has been a more problematic candidate for critical rehabilitation than Julien Duvivier (1896-1967). Among his illustrious contemporaries -- Marcel Carné, René Clair, Jacques Feyder and Jean Renoir (with whom he formed the so-called Big Five of the 1930s) -- Duvivier was the most protean. In a career that spanned a half-century of almost uninterrupted activity, he directed some 65 films in a wide range of genres, though his reputation still is based on a handful of films he made in the 1930s, when "poetic realism" was the critical catchword.

 

Like many of his generation, Duvivier came to the cinema via the stage. Born in Lille, he joined the troupe of the celebrated Odéon Theater in 1915, when many actors were called up for military service, but he never graduated beyond bit parts and supporting roles. Duvivier would later claim his diminutive stature and poor memory impeded any serious professional aspirations but that he always remained a man of the theater at heart. Indeed personal memories inform his poisoned valentine to his first craft in La Fin du jour (1938), a caustic portrait of life in a retirement home for destitute actors.

 

Duvivier made his first contact with the cinema under the auspices of the great André Antoine, the guru of stage naturalism, for whom he worked as production assistant. In 1916 (at age 57) Antoine had made his film-directing debut with The Corsican Brothers, in which he began to apply his theories to screen realism, shooting away from the studio and directing his actors in a more natural manner. The influence of Antoine’s quest for authenticity and atmosphere can be seen throughout Duvivier’s own work.

 

Immediately after the Great War, Duvivier began his journeyman years as a director, using the contacts he made at the Odéon and with Antoine to cast his films. Between 1919 and 1929, he gradually mastered the tools of his trade, directing 20 silent films which covered most of the genres in vogue at the time: religious films, comedies, prestige literary adaptations, bourgeois melodramas, thrillers. His first film, Haceldama, was a fiasco (its recent restoration reveals a film that must rank as one of the most dismally unpromising debuts in film history!). Undaunted, Duvivier persisted, accepting assignments in Nice, Brussels, and Munich, where he made the first French-German co-production in 1922, L’Ouragan sur la montagne (a nervy initiative considering that German films were still unwelcome on French screens). He also made what must be the first montage documentary on the history of cinema, La Machine à refaire la vie (1924), which was conceived to illustrate a touring lecture Duvivier had put together.

 

In 1925, Duvivier directed his breakthrough into the mainstream, the silent version of Jules Rénard’s chronicle of childhood, Poil de carotte. Its success earned Duvivier an invitation from veteran producers Marcel Vandal and Charles Delac to work at their Film d’Art, a prestige production house with its own studio facilities and contract staff.  Duvivier would spend the next nine years here, directing some of his finest late silent films as well as such early sound classics as the remake of Poil de Carotte, which would remain Duvivier’s own favorite among his films. The importance of the Film d’Art years in Duvivier’s growth as a technician cannot be underestimated. The studio offered him a structured professional environment where he could consolidate his skills on a day-to-day, film-by-film basis with the same producers, writers, cameramen and set designers. It was here that he learned the value of teamwork that would contribute so much to the collective genius of the French cinema in the 30s.

 

With the advent of sound, Duvivier immediately came into his own as a master of screen realism. David Golder (1930), which inaugurated his extraordinary collaboration with actor Harry Baur, established Duvivier as one of the leading industry names, a reputation he maintained with such films as La Tête d’un homme, one of the earliest Simenon adaptations in which Baur embodied the quintessential screen Maigret; La Bandera, a Foreign Legion saga which launched Jean Gabin’s persona of the populist anti-hero marked by malevolent fate; La Belle équipe and Carnet de bal, the template for the European sketch film, which Duvivier would attempt to replicate during his wartime exile in the United States. But Duvivier dismayed admirers and detractors alike by continuing to work in genres they now considered beneath him, such as the biblical spectacular (Golgotha), the remake of silent classics (The Golem ), and the literary  and play adaptation (Marie Chapdelaine and Paquebot Tenacity). Duvivier also further resisted pigeonholing as a gloomy pessimist (Poil de carotte has an overwhelmingly moving happy ending not to be found in the literary source, and his recently rediscovered early sound comedy, Allo Berlin, Ici Paris gives René Clair a run for his money in its the imaginative use of sound and the comic visual maestria.

 

The success of Pépé le Moko (which was the number one 1937 box office success in Japan, where Duvivier is still idolized) earned Duvivier a red-carpet invitation to Hollywood where, feted by his American peers, he again showed a sunnier side of his temperament by directing one of MGM’s most exhilarating musical confections, The Great Waltz. Two years later, after making the unjustly forgotten all-star propaganda epic, Untel père et fils (Heart of a Nation), Duvivier joined the French colony in exile and made four more pictures in Hollywood.

 

Duvivier’s return to France in 1945 was greeted by high expectations in the industry. But his homecoming effort, Panique, an irremediably bleak vision of cupidity, lust and mob mentality, was a failure. Critics saw it as a throwback to the pre-war esthetic of poetic realism (as they did Marcel Carné’s first post-Liberation superproduction, Les Portes de la nuit.) Now supplanted by a new generation of directors who had remained home during the Occupation (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker, Claude Autant-Lara, et al.), Duvivier never really recovered his erstwhile status. The phenomenal success of his The Little World of Don Camillo, based on Giovanni Guareschi’s bestseller about the plucky Italian parish priest, played by Fernandel, brought him back into the mainstream limelight, but critics considered this success as a sign of the director’s definitive decline in rank commercialism.

 

Yet Duvivier’s postwar career displayed no real flagging in his creative powers, only a change in the aesthetic climate that had nurtured his pre-war classics. Panique, with a powerful central performance by Michel Simon, is now considered one of the major films of the immediate post-war. Duvivier cleverly adapted the sketch film concept in tragicomic Sous le ciel de Paris, which interweaves the lives of half a dozen Parisians during a 24-hour period. La Fête à Henriette, one of the most lucid comedies about the process of screenwriting, was remade in Hollywood as Paris When It Sizzles. Voici le temps des assassins, today hailed by genre critics as one of the most noir of French films noirs of the 50s, completed the screen gentrification of Jean Gabin as middle-class patriarch. Pot-Bouille, his last great studio film, was a period satire that superbly blended the realism of Zola's source novel with exhilarating Feydeau-like farce.

 

Unclassifiable, Duvivier was by turns an artist, a craftsman and a polished hack. Like so many of his American colleagues from John Ford to Michael Curtis to King Vidor, Duvivier practiced an eclecticism that reflected both a vast curiosity and stylistic fluency and a submission to the constraints of a profession that was both art and industry. Though a dour, private man, Duvivier himself was the most modest of filmmakers even as he was the most demanding of himself and his collaborators. Time and again, he declared he was merely a conscientious artisan, that he had nothing to say and that a film’s style was dictated by its subject. In 1934 he told an interviewer: "Too many people imagine that the cinema is an amateur’s art, that one has a calling and that faith is all one needs to create a masterpiece. The sudden revelation of an inexperienced personality in filmmaking is a myth. Genius is just a word; filmmaking is a craft, a tough craft that must be learned. Personally, the more I work, the more I realize how little I know in proportion to the infinite possibilities of cinematic expression."

JEAN RENOIR ON JULIEN DUVIVIER

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.

There is a lot of talk about technique nowadays. Duvivier never discussed technique, but nothing that had to do with the expression of his craft escaped him. In my mind, his place in the pantheon of those who invented the cinema as we know it is comparable to that occupied in literature by Sully Prudhomme or José-Maria de Heredia, with the difference being that these poets are links in the history of verse, whereas Duvivier is the point of departure toward a manner of telling a story with a camera, a manner which, strictly speaking, is today's style.

This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet. His films are never mere expositions of a subject; he lures us into a world at once realistic and unreal. This world is never just the product of his imagination; it also stems from his acute sense of observation. His characters are real, yet they are also fantastic. A stickler for precision, Duvivier was also a dreamer.

For the public at large, Duvivier was dour, vexatious, ill-tempered, disagreeable. For his friends, he was kindness itself. His tenderness went out first and foremost to those "who practiced their craft well" but also extended to those who might need him.

His veiled generosity was immense and his devotion to his friends unlimited.

I think I know what the link was that bound his deep love of "work well done," his acute sense of objective observation and his aspirations for a world of unbridled poetry: music. Duvivier spent much of his leisure time in contact with Beethoven, Bach and Handel. He enjoyed the company of these Masters. This is where he probably found the elements on which he relied for the conception and execution of his films.

May his influence continue. It will give our craft that professional dignity without which no great civilization is possible.

 --  Renoir’s obituary homage to Duvivier from Le Figaro Littéraire, November 6, 1967

 

CLAUDE CHABROL ON JULIEN DUVIVIER

I think that Duvivier has been largely underrated in France. He should be restored to the place he deserves. In France we're monotheistic: we can't have two gods at the same time; so to champion Renoir (and Gance), the New Wave toppled the others....

Among the French directors of the classic period, Duvivier is my favorite with Renoir (who was, in addition, a poet).

A lot of rubbish has been said about Duvivier, things like "He's not an auteur" and "he has no personal universe"... His inner "universe," his outlook on life, come out very clearly in films like Panique, Voici les temps des assassins, his philosophy is there. He wasn't an ironist (like I am), he was truly pessimistic. Evidently, he didn't have a poetic universe, since his viewpoint had no place for poetry. But that's no reason to say he wasn't an auteur. He was an auteur who didn't declare himself one. An auteur is someone who, whatever the subject, always manages to appropriate it: that's exactly the case of our friend Duvivier.

-- Chabrol quoted in Hubert Niogret and Pierre Billard’s Julien Duvivier (Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 1996