There’s a different rhythm to early sound films. Though
discussion always focuses on how many actors and actresses found it difficult
transitioning from silent films to talkies, be it due to an unsuitable voice or
a lack of proper vehicles, there was also a transition required of the people
behind the cameras. The staging and pacing was different once dialogue was
required. Indeed, even filming was different, because you had to accommodate for
the actors having to say actual words out loud and capturing them on
microphone.
So, just like with actors, only the most adaptable directors
carried on and even flourished. John Ford in America, to name one example.
Hitchcock in England. And Julien Duvivier in France.
The Eclipse set
Julien Duvivier in the Thirties
offers up four of the director’s first sound films, starting with
DavidGolder, released in 1930 and made a full decade after Duvivier’s
first silent film. Though neither as well-known nor as accomplished of the
director’s most popular feature,
Pepe le moko,
David Golder--and indeed, all of the quartet here--shows a
skilled artist eager to master his evolving craft. From the opening sequence of
David Golder--a rapid-cut, impressionistic overview of the
cultural, industrial, and economic situation in France at the 1920s--it’s clear
Duvivier is ready to zoom into a new era.
David Golder was based on the novel of
the moment, a dramatic tome by Irene Nemirovsky, who enjoyed a renaissance in
recent years with her novel
Suite Francaise. The David
Golder of the title, played by regular Duvivier leading man Harry Baur (the
Jean Valjean of Raymond Bernard’s
Les Miserables [
review]),
is a free-market businessman about to get a lesson in the ups-and-downs
inherent in capitalist bullishness. Our first exposure to the man is his
relishing the ruin of a former partner who plotted against him and struck out
on his own. When said partner commits suicide, Golder is unmoved. He insists
the traitor should have reinvented himself, something Golder has had to do many
times. Turn your loss into a win.
Karma comes around pretty fast, though, and Golder finds
himself on shaky ground, and partially because of the very thing he tried to
deny in business: a personal life. Golder’s wife (Paul Andral) is living a
lavish existence on the Riviera, spending money alongside the couple’s spoiled
daughter, Joyce (Jackie Monnier). As things unravel for Golder, he shows where
his true loyalties lie. He’d rather let his wife sink if it means his daughter
can swim. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Golder is not going to go down so easy, not
without pulling the rug out and dragging her husband with her.
David Golder touches on a lot of important
issues, including class, privilege, and race. Despite his money, there are many
who look down on Golder because he is Jewish. Baur plays the dour character
with an appropriate heaviness. He is as self-isolating as he is self-made. As a
father, he is exasperated and indulgent, and the sprightly blonde Monnier uses
his own weight against him, both narratively and in terms of performance. She
is as airy as he is grounded. The contrast tires us as much as it does Golder
himself, meaning we are as exhausted as he is at the end, a strange feat of
empathy on the part of Duvivier.
Though the camera stays relatively stable for the majority
of Duvivier’s film, it never feels dull or static. Scenes are long and there
are gaps in dialogue, the way there often was before directors learned how to
fill all that space, but there is also a precision to what is chosen that
suggests that Duvivier is already comfortable with conversation. Sure, more is
said that in a silent film’s intertitles, but the lack of excess means no
word--or moment--is wasted.
By 1932, when Duvivier remade his own
Poil deCarotte, any hesitancy about movies with sound had long since passed.
One could argue there might have been an added confidence in fleshing out
material he already knew so well, though my own memory of the silent version of
Poil de Carotte is hazy at this point, so I can’t say definitively
how much the later effort differs [my review of the 1925 version is
here].
Poil de Carotte is based on a novel by
Jules Renard. It stars Robert Lynen as “Carrottop,” the youngest of three
children in the Lepic family. His nickname is for his red hair, given to him
affectionately by his father (a returning Baur), but generally used derisively.
The Lepics are dysfunctional on their best day. Madame Lepic (Catherine
Fonteney) doesn’t much care for her third child, instead doting on her oldest
boy Felix (Maxime Fromiot), a bully and a thief, and the self-absorbed middle
child, the girl Ernestine (Simone Aubry). Monsieur Lepic means well, but he’s
distracted, particularly once his campaign for mayor is underway.
This leaves Carrottop (real name: Francois) to his own
devices, and the imaginative boy is plagued by ghostly visions and a suicidal
impulse. Both are shown by Duvivier via inventive special effects, including
one scene where two dream images of Carrottop debate his future over the boy’s
sleeping body, the proverbial angle and devil sitting on his shoulder. The
superimposed figures are simple, but effective. Duvivier is stretching himself
throughout
Poil de Carotte. Armand Thirard and Emile
Monniot’s cameras have become more active observers, sometimes probing a scene,
moving between the players, and following the action within the frame. (Thirard
was also a cinematographer on
David Golder). In a
particularly important segment, Carrottop’s youthful desires turn to a jealous
rage, and the filmmakers let the anger take over. As the child whips on his
horses, driving his wagon faster and faster, they use overhead shots of passing
trees to show speed, POV vantage points from the front of the wagon to demonstrate
the child’s looming madness, and also a wide view from behind, showing us how
wild Carrottop’s path has become.
The cutting is sharper here, too. Editor Marthe Poncin uses
dialogue to weave in and out of scenes, ironically juxtaposing a line with the
image that follows, or stitching two separate pieces of dialogue together to
connect different events.
Of course, all the technical wizardry in the world wouldn’t
save Poil de Carotte if the performances were bad, and
Duvivier pulls a particularly impressive turn from his young star. Lynen is the
essential component of the film, and his performance is full of humor and
emotion. He is equally convincing joking around as despairing over what he
perceives to be his inescapable fate. The climactic scenes of his final
attempts to end his life are disturbing and raw, but perhaps more memorable is
the tenderness that comes before, when he shares a sweet moment with his
childhood romance (Colette Segall). It’s an exchange so honestly felt, it’s
almost too bad the film didn’t end there, with the innocence of young love
giving Carrottop courage to carry on, rather than the borderline mawkish
reconciliation between father and son.
The following year, Duvivier would attack genre in the most
impressive
La tête d’un homme, adapting the work of Georges Simenon.
On the surface, this is a fairly conventional procedural: a man (Gaston
Jacquet) loudly grouses in a crowded bar that he’d pay handsomely for his rich
aunt to be killed and an opportunistic eavesdropper takes him up on it. When
the deed is done, Inspector Jules Maigret (Baur) has to figure out who did the
deed. He suspects the nephew is involved, and that the dim delivery man
(Alexandre Rignault,
Eyes Without a Face) that they’ve
apprehended is just a patsy. The real culprit is Radek (Valery Inkijinoff), a
Czech immigrant with a terminal illness and sociopathic tendencies.
La tête d’un homme isn’t really a
mystery, it’s a character study. Duvivier shows us all the pieces, and we are
generally one step ahead of Maigret. The central question is what is motivating
Radek. Is he just a bad dude or is there something else behind it? His
character unpeels slowly, with Inkijinoff projecting a cold confidence that
eventually devolves into a more unhinged pathology. His performance in the
latter half of the film seems to be cribbed somewhat from Peter Lorre’s in
M [
review], but Inkijinoff doesn’t sell it nearly as well. He’s best
when being charming and calculating.
Harry Baur is barely recognizable as the detective. He is
calm and cool, the wheels constantly spinning in his brain, and relatively
unflappable. It’s easy to see why Duvivier used him over and over. You hardly
track that it’s the same man from picture to picture. He can do anything, and
should be listed alongside
Michel Simon and
Jean Gabin as one of the
unforgettable masters of early French cinema.
Duvivier’s structuring of Simenon’s crime fiction is
elegant and effortless. Thirard and Poncin return on camera and editing duties,
and clearly the crew has locked into a groove by this point. The eye is drawn
through a scene carefully, Duvivier making sure we see the right clues. He also
remains inventive, with one stand-out sequence illustrating both the drudgery
of canvassing witnesses but also the speed to which one cop follows up on
leads. In the scene, the officer remains in the same space within the frame,
but the locale keeps changing. Duvivier placed his actor in front of a
rear-projection screen and has him talking to actors via pre-recorded footage,
effectively jumping from location to location but without ever cutting. At one
point, he even has another actress walk on to give the cop an answer, as if she
were on the other end of the shop from the person the cop is facing. For modern
audiences, the effect is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less clever.
(And watch for the actress tossing a look directly at the camera as she walks
back off. Oops.)
The final film in
Julien Duvivier in the
Thirties is perhaps the best. Released the same year as
Pepe
le moko,
Un carnet de bal (or
Dance
Card) is a crafty ensemble piece reminiscent of Max Ophüls. It stars
Marie Bell as Christine, a newly widowed woman in her late 30s whose present
grief inspires her to look back at past loves. A dance card from a ball she
attended at age 16 provides a road map, of sorts; she will visit each of her
former dance partners and see how the intervening decades have treated them.
Also, they will hopefully know the whereabouts of Gerard, the one who got away.
What Christine finds on her journey surprises her. Life
takes funny turns in twenty years. The lawyer has become a crook (Fernandel),
the artist is now a priest (Harry Baur). Some of the men have married, some
have had children. Most have realized their dreams on some small scale of
success, even if, in some cases, tragedy followed. Christine is ill prepared
for these turns of event, and even less so for the one underlying theme in the
tales of all her former suitors: their lives changed the night of the dance,
the night she broke all of their hearts.
Thought never explicitly stated, what Duvivier’s script
explores are the reverberations a small action can have. In this case, the
casual offer of affection, and the subsequent withdrawal of the same. Christine
is never presented as callous or mean, except perhaps by the mother who claims
her son took his life when Christine rejected him; yet that mother is reacting
with her own broken heart, and we have no reason not to believe Christine when
she says the boy had never confessed his feelings. Or could that be Christine’s
greatest sin? She was oblivious. Even now, her real goal isn’t really to catch
up with these old beaus, but to find out something about herself, and the irony
is that, despite how things turned out for them, the one-time suitors whom she
hurt have lived richer lives than the one of sheltered wealth she chose
instead.
Un carnet de bal flows smoothly from one
episode to another. Duvivier plays most of it straight. Outside of some
intriguing cross-fades, he never really calls attention to his technique, the
craft has become invisible. In fact, the director inadvertently creates his own
metaphor for his style. When Christine first starts to reminisce about the
fateful night of her youth, the memory literally dances in, a slow superimposing
of past over present. It’s beautiful and elegant, an enticing invitation to
follow where the reverie will lead.
As an artist, Julien Duvivier has done the same. His
inventions have intrigued, his constructions occasionally dazzled, even as he
slowly erodes the evidence of each, immersing us in his narratives until we are
so thoroughly involved, we forget all else.
These discs were provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.
