Julien Duvivier

Julien Duvivier was one of the four or five directors who made French poetic realism in the 1930s, and he is the least remembered of them because he worked in every genre and belonged to no movement. He began in silent cinema in 1919 and made more than sixty films. La Belle Equipe, released in 1936 in the middle of the Popular Front, is about five unemployed men who win the lottery and set up a riverside cafe as a cooperative - and it was shot with two endings, one in which the collective enterprise works and one in which the friendship destroys itself, with the pessimistic version prevailing after preview audiences. The film is inseparable from the moment: the Matignon accords of June 1936 gave French workers paid holidays and collective bargaining, and the imagery of ordinary people beside a river belongs to that summer. Pepe le Moko in 1937 made Jean Gabin an international star and was remade twice in Hollywood. He spent the war in America, returned, and made the Don Camillo comedies among much else. Renoir said of him that if he had been an American he would have been recognised as one of the greats, and Bergman and Welles both praised him. Critics of the New Wave dismissed the whole tradition he came from, which is much of why the name faded. The alternative endings survive and both are shown. Which one a viewer sees changes the film from a Popular Front hymn into a fable about why cooperatives fail, and Duvivier preferred the bleak one. He was killed in a car accident in Paris in 1967.

• Lived: 1896 CE – 1967 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: artist