In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Julien Duvivier by Ben McCann
  • Keith Reader
Julien Duvivier. By Ben McCann. (French Film Directors.) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. xii + 254 pp., ill.

With a career all but fifty years long, and sixty-five feature films to his credit, Julien Duvivier assuredly counts as a monument of classic French cinema. That very phrase may suggest why he is nowadays, if undeservedly, something of a neglected figure, less fluidly innovative than Jean Renoir in his mise en scène or than Marcel Carné in his narrative technique (as witness the flashbacks in Le Jour se lève). Pépé le Moko (1937) remains Duvivier's best-known work, and a signature Jean Gabin vehicle, while the recent DVD issue of La Belle Équipe (1936) is welcome after a long period of unavailability. This makes Ben McCann's meticulous and admirably documented monograph—the first English-language book-length study of the director's œuvre—very timely indeed. McCann's advocacy rather shoots itself in the foot early on when in defending the filmmaker's 'narrative swerves' he alleges that one 'can easily imagine the response in Cahiers [du cinéma] had Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder […] glided between such divergent stories' (p. 13)—a bizarre remark given that one of the reasons Cahiers so cherished Hawks as an auteur was precisely his gliding between divergent genres, and hence stories. But for the rest this is a valuable and often incisive treatment of a film-maker whose later career movement between France and Hollywood at once permitted and was fuelled by 'his willingness to tack and jibe between popular cinema and auteur cinema' (p. 171). We might almost be on Planet Buñuel or with Godard's Weekend when we read that, in Golgotha (1938), '[w]hen Jesus tells Peter to "feed my sheep", Duvivier cuts to a flock of sheep' (p. 74). Particularly arresting, and cogently argued, is the assertion that 'he, more than any other director from this period, "created" Gabin' (p. 79)—something that makes the misattribution of the front-cover photograph (which identifies Gérard Blain as Gabin) all the more unfortunate. It is also curious that René Lefèvre is contextualized by a reference to his work with René Clair when his best-known role was for Renoir (in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936)), and that no allusion is made to Monsieur Hire, Patrice Leconte's 1989 remake of Panique (1947). But these are minor criticisms of an erudite and comprehensive study, which does a sterling job in its evaluation of a director too readily dismissed as a journeyman exponent of cinéma de qualité. [End Page 613]

Keith Reader
University of London Institute in Paris
...

pdf

Share