Julien Duvivier is a famous name, but what exactly for? One film, first of all, Pepe le Moko, a crime drama which isn't noir but clearly influenced noir along with other poetic realism titles of the late 30s, and also influenced lots of other tough guy romances— it's pretty much hard to imagine Casablanca or the other classics of Humphrey Bogart's career without it. But after that... Un Carnet de Bal was a huge international hit in the 1930s but has been impossible to see for a long time, Panique and Poil de Carotte are moderately well known, and he made some kind of interesting but less than stellar films in Hollywood— Tales of Manhattan, the Vivien Leigh Anna Karenina, and so on. But he's one of those directors who it seems like you've always heard of, yet here we are having seen almost nothing of him.
So Eclipse's four-film Julien Duvivier in the Thirties set first of all finally gives us Un Carnet de Bal, but also a reasonable cross-section of his other work in that era (save Pepe le Moko, which has long been available from Criterion). Which is as much as we're likely to get any time soon. The four films also stand as a testament to another great figure of French cinema, the actor Harry Baur, who made seven films with Duvivier (as well as the two films in the Eclipse Raymond Bernard set, Wooden Crosses and Les Miserables), a big bear of an actor of the type so essential to French cinema (Raimu, Michel Simon, Philippe Noiret, etc.) Huge in personality and also in size, he's not lovable like Raimu or Simon, but like Depardieu a titanic force on screen, a thunderstorm about to happen in many of his roles.
The first film:
David Golder was the bestselling 1929 debut of a Russian Jewish-born novelist named Irene Nemirovsky, who became a French Catholic and contributed to nationalist (e.g. fascist) magazines, which self-reinvention did her no good in the end as she died in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving behind a manuscript of life in the Occupation (Suite Française) which would give her another bestseller in the early 2000s. Apparently based on the family she despised (which is not to say that the Irene character gets any love either), it's the story of a ruthless immigrant Jewish financier in Paris who hits a rough patch, realizes belatedly that the people he's been working for—his wife and daughter—are basically leeches, who've turned his Biarritz home into a nonstop party for more of the same, and he's been wasting his life killing himself to make money to keep them in style. If this were Dodsworth he'd meet a better woman to spend his days with, if it were the 70s at least William Holden would have a fling with Kay Lenz (Breezy, dir: Clint Eastwood), but this being pitiless social realism in the vein of Balzac and Zola, apparently, life has all the dignity and higher purpose of an ox being carted to Les Halles.
But it being Harry Baur as Golder, even though reports online suggest that nobody is particularly sympathetic in the novel (and many have seen anti-semitism in it), Baur's Golder is a poignant figure, struggling to catch up to self-knowledge and a reason for his life, in the end achieving a kind of rapprochement with his immigrant origins. Mainly, though, he tears into the part like a bulldog with a porterhouse—a scene where he's on his deathbed (or more accurately, the first of a series of deathbeds) and his wife is trying to wheedle some more property out of him, leads to a knockdown dragout fight even though Baur can barely move, which is some kind of master class in acting with all four limbs tied down, as if Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot was playing Daniel Day-Lewis in The Gangs of New York. Not for the first time, the movie of a bleak book can't help but find some humanity in characters envisioned by their author as reptilian. And in fact, whenever this has a chance to be the French equivalent of a Warren William executive drama, Baur and Duvivier go for it with all the gusto you could want.
Mordaunt Hall reviewed the 1931 film for the NY Times in 1932, and sniffed unimpressedness (while allowing that Baur is pretty good), so I expected an exceptionally fine film for 1931, and in general I would say that is true, while acknowledging a certain slog at one 15-minute section where Golder seems to have sunk into depression and/or senility, only temporarily. Duvivier would have done fine simply pointing the camera at Baur and standing clear, as Alexander Korda did for Raimu in Marius, but in fact he's plainly working hard in his first sound film to keep alive the visual inventiveness of the silent era (he'd worked for over a decade as a director by this point), sometimes successfully, sometimes not. What certainly works is the set design—nearly everything is set in big empty rooms out of Kane's Xanadu, striking symbols of Golder's big empty life. It's undoubtedly a handsome film. Other efforts are less effective; Duvivier has a curious habit of filming from slightly above, as if the cameraman were on the second step of a ladder, which is simply odd and disorienting (though it will prove effective in one of the later films), and he tries to keep the principles of montage alive by allowing conversations to run while we look at something else. The most striking example is that we follow the waiter, not Golder and his dinner companion, as they talk and the waiter serves them. It's interesting, but it throws you out of the movie as you contemplate, why are we looking at the waiter's poker face and not them?
Eclipse of course is Criterion's modest-priced line, in which they try to find good material but don't go to endless effort on restoration, but—probably because it had no reissue value after a couple of years of sound—the print material on David Golder is pretty much perfect, as pristine and pretty (at least when the daughter and her princely beau are cavorting in nature) as a spring day, and despite Hall's claims, the sound recording seems fine, while the pace is reasonably brisk for 1931. It is a promising start to the set which shows us a world (the Paris bourse and those who make fortunes there) we haven't really seen in other French films.
