Julien Duvivier - After The War

After The War

On his return to France, Duvivier experienced some difficulties in resuming his career. Panique (1946), an exhaustive summary of the lowest of human instincts, was the most personal, darkest, and nihilistic of his works. It was a bitter failure - with critics and the public. Duvivier continued, notwithstanding, to work in France until the end of his life, apart from a short period in Great Britain to shoot Anna Karenina (1948) and to Spain for Black Jack (1950).

Sous le ciel de Paris (1951) is a highly original film from the point of view of the way the film was cut. In the course of a day in Paris one follows people whose paths will cross. The same year Duvivier shot the first of the humorous Don Camillo films from the Giovanni Guareschi books, Le Petit monde de Don Camillo. It met with immediate popular success and he followed its success with Le Retour de Don Camillo (1953). The series continued with other directors.

In Voici le temps des assassins (1956), Jean Gabin plays a decent restaurateur in Les Halles who is swindled by a cynical young woman, Catherine, (Danièle Delorme). Marie-Octobre (1959) followed, featuring Danielle Darrieux, Serge Reggiani, and Bernard Blier amongst others. It was an exercise in style; 11 people, 9 men, 2 women, and a mise en scène that followed the unities of time, place, and action, it had a constant concern for the framing of the composition to reinforce an inquisitorial, menacing atmosphere. The same year he was invited to be part of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, 1959, the year the Nouvelle Vague fully emerged. Duvivier's final portmanteau film was Le Diable et les dix Commandements (1962), while the scenario of Chair de Poule (1963) has a resemblances to The Postman Always Rings Twice and again features an unscrupulous woman.

During the fall of 1967, just as the production of Diaboliquement vôtre reached completion, a film about a man made amnesiac following a car accident, Duvivier himself was in a traffic accident, triggering a heart attack which killed him. He was 71; he left behind a filmography comprising nearly 70 films. He is buried in the cemetery of Rueil-Malmaison in the Hauts-de-Seine.