Julien Duvivier
14 titles · french classical
The most fatalistic French studio films of the 1930s were Duvivier's, and his men are usually cornered: a Parisian gangster hiding in the Casbah of Algiers in Pépé le Moko, a murderer who joins the Spanish Foreign Legion in La Bandera, five unemployed workers who win the lottery and buy a ruin to turn into a café in La Belle Équipe. He spent the war in Hollywood on anthology films, and came home to Panic, about a misanthrope in a Paris suburb who is the one man not talking about a local murder.
Signature
- Poetic realism: port cities, colonial outposts and working men with no way out.
- Jean Gabin in Pépé le Moko, La Bandera and La Belle Équipe.
- Groups held together by money or memory (La Belle Équipe, Life Dances On, The End of the Day).
- Hollywood portmanteau films linked by an object or a frame story (Tales of Manhattan, Flesh and Fantasy).
fit
