Deauville - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

• F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions Deauville in "The Great Gatsby" as a place Tom Buchanan and Daisy visit on their honeymoon.
• Deauville was probably the location inspiration for the fictional casino in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. The first of the James Bond series largely takes part in a Casino – Fleming had played at Deauville as a young man, and sets his tale of Bond versus Soviet agents in a fictional French gambling resort, drawing parallels with an actual WW2 visit he had made to a Portuguese casino whilst working for the British secret service.
• The screen adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links was set in Deauville.
• The Deauville casino is the setting for the heist in Bob le flambeur, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. It is also held-up in the 2008 movie Mesrine: L'ennemi public № 1.
• Deauville was the setting for part of A Man and a Woman.
• Deauville, together with Cabourg and Trouville, provides the basis for the Norman coastal resort of Balbec in Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). For a discussion of Proust's use of Norman locations and the interplay between the social structures of his novel and the region's place in French social history, see http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-925688-8.pdf
• Deauville was a popular vacation spot for Coco Chanel during her affair with Boy Capel. The two opened her second shop there, which was the first place Chanel took the step from hat making to clothing. Deauville was the birthplace of Chanel's clothing career.