The Heart of a Nation

Till 2017, only a truncated version of the film (77 min) was available ; thus the story which spanned over 70 years (1871-1939) was hardly intelligible ; now restored at a running time of 106 min, probably the director's cut, this work has become more enjoyable, more endearing and needs reassessment.

It's close to the movie made up of sketches , a genre Duvivier lent credibility to (« un carnet de bal » ,1937 ; but the restored film shows more continuity , even though it cannot be looked upon as a seamless whole .Depicting the story of a family through the years is not an easy task and even for Duvivier it may seem a bit too much ; but in a way ,it predates Claude Lelouch 's interminable sagas ,the likes of « toute une vie » and « les uns et les autres « in the seventies and eighties .

Intended as a propaganda film , the mayor 's (Fernand Ledoux ) words echo to the priest's at the end of William Wyler's « Mrs Miniver « (1942) ; trying to tell at once a family chronicle and a summary of 70 years of French history, Duvivier was blamed because he forgot vital moments such as the Dreyfus affair and the 1936 Front Populaire : yet,for the latter , the director's « la belle équipe « (1936) caught this period zeitgeist as no other film did .And a short sequence shows Hitler writing « Mein kampf » circa 1924 ....

Duvivier's legendary pessimism is not abiding but occasionally surfaces :people rejoice as WW1 finally comes to an end , but simultaneously the schoolteacher and his wife learn that their son was killed in action ; ominous coincidence ,the captain who waves the pilot away as he takes off is played by Robert le Vigan, an excellent actor but a future collaborator in the occupation days,unwittingly ironical .The students celebrate their degrees but they turn the radio on, just to hear Hitler's threatening voice .

The son who has made great achievements in Africa (Louis Jouvet) has turned into a tired,embittered man, who does not care about honors anymore .

It's a sprawling movie, but now and then , Duvivier's touch can be felt;Raimu and Suzy Prim are the stand-outs .The former is first a womanizer ,who takes his self-righteous nephews to a belle epoque cabaret where they share a table with a girl of easy virtue ; it is a very funny moment ,to rival the best of Guitry .The old beau , ruined because he bought the Soviet loans , becomes a concierge ,then runs a hotel where he welcomes the immigrants ,which make some people moan and groan , a subject still relevant today. Prim portrays an old maid, who sacrificed her youth for the sake of her siblings , becomes a devoted nurse, working night and day during WW1 and is awarded the Légion D' Honneur , the director's feminist side.

Even though it does not make it as a whole, every Duvivier 's buff must see the restored version, a vast improvement on the digest one.

In 1871, Paris fell to the German armies, and the father of a sister and two brothers never returned. To their village of Montmartre. This film is about the sister, Suzy Prim, and her baby brothers, played by Louis Jouvet, their sometimes wealthy uncle from Marseilles, Raimu, the girl they both loved but only one married, Michèle Morgan, their children, their children's children, and the their wives and husbands through the end of the Phony War in 1940.

Julien Duvivier directed most of this in 1940, but could not release it because by the time it was ready, the Germans were in Paris. He took it with him to the United States, worked on it some more with expatriates like Mlle Morgan and Charles Boyer. It finally premiered in France in the fall of 1945, although not in the version I looked at.

Because it takes place over the course of almost 70 years, it seems to ramble, but it's the tale of the growth of a family, from illiterate farmers through teachers, ending with a medical doctor, the growth of the bourgeois middle class from peasant roots, always hoping for peace and a chance to tend their own affairs, and those of their nation thereby. Jouvet doesn't look like Jouvet in this one, and Raimu doesn't dominate, although he's playing his wonted comical-tragic character. Surprising to me for a Duvivier film, it's the women who draw the audience's eyes: Mlle Prim, an old maid from raising her brothers, and Mlle Morgan, coming to tell Jouvet of their son's death. There's no magical realism here, no femme fatale, just a heartfelt hope that peace may be restored, and the pear tree that the father tended will produce fruit for his great-great-grandchildren.

Directed by Julien Divivier in 1940, released in the US in 1943, and in France after WW2 (considered as anti-nazi propaganda) about the story of a family through 3 following wars starting from 1871. Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Michele Morgan... A movie to watch for what it represented, filmed at a period of censorship by Vichy regime.

Strange destiny that the one of this movie.Shot in 1940,it was actually released after the Liberation,(in 1945,not 1943)at least in France.It is easy to see why.It encompasses seventy years,from 1871 to 1940,and its last pictures show an old couple,praying in a church at the beginning of WW2.

In a nutshell,it's a very kitsch work,which has not worn well.It must have seemed obsolete even for the 1945 audience.It's almost impossible to feel Duvivier's touch in this family saga ,full of mushy scenes,most of them laughable .Duvivier is a very pessimistic director whose best works ("la belle équipe"(1936) "pépé le moko" (1937) "la fin du jour " (1939) "panique" (1946) and "voici le temps des assassins"(1956))are close to film noir.Duvivier needs a compact screenplay,his art becomes null and void when it comes to depict a lot of characters during a long long long time.Besides,"untel père et fils" is much too short -hardly 80 minutes- and does not rise to the occasion as far ambition is concerned.The pace is very fast(eg:five minutes are given over to WW1!!),sometimes it becomes impossible to follow the plot and to know who is who-eg:Louis Jouvet appears at the beginning of the movie,playing both the father and the son,then disappears during one entire hour, just to reappear,in an absurd way ,ten minutes before the end.

Enough is enough!the 1870 war,WW1,and the beginning of WW2,Montmartre and the artists,la Commune,the building of the Sacre-Coeur,Moulin Rouge and the de rigueur French cancan,the beginnings of the flying machines,the woman with a gold heart who devotes her life to the Sick and the Poor -who predates the Occupation melodrama,the likes of Jean Stelli's 1942 "le voile bleu"(American remake "Blue Veil" in 1951 by Curtis Bernardt)- and Raimu , his Marseilles accent and his bouillabaisse. Stuffing all this and three wars too in such a short film is quite a feat in itself but it does not make a masterwork for all that.

Julien Duvivier is a wonderful director,but if you want to see something really great,just pick up one of the works I mention above.This one is nothing more than a curio.