Born in Lille in 1896 and died in Paris in 1967, Julien Duvivier made some seventy films between the silent era and the 1960s, and was one of the most commercially successful directors of the French cinema of the 1930s. With Jean Gabin he made La Belle Équipe, Pépé le Moko and La Bandera, films which established the fatalistic, romantic mood later called poetic realism. Un carnet de bal (1937) is an episodic story of a widow tracing the dancers of her youth. He worked in Hollywood during the Second World War and returned to make Panique (1946), a dark portrait of a village hunting a scapegoat.
Filmography
- Poil de Carotte (1932)
- Golgotha (1935)
- La Belle Équipe (1936)
- Pépé le Moko (1937)
- Un carnet de bal (1937)
- The Great Waltz (1938)
- Flesh and Fantasy (1943)
- Panique (1946)
- Anna Karenina (1948)
- Under the Paris Sky (1951)
- Marie-Octobre (1959)