Directed by Julien Duvivier

Julien Duvivier was among the definitive craftsmen of classical French cinema, bringing expressive camera work, atmospheric mise-en-scène, and a darkly lyrical sensibility to often-overlooked jewels across an extraordinary array of genres. His deeply shadowed, fatalistic early sound films DAVID GOLDER and LA TÊTE D’UN HOMME anticipate the poetic-realist style that would come to define 1930s Gallic cinema, and which would find one of its fullest expressions in the intoxicatingly doom-laden, Algiers-set underworld drama PÉPÉ LE MOKO. From the elegant, wistful romance of UN CARNET DE BAL to the startlingly bleak noir pessimism of PANIQUE to the charmingly imaginative meta-comedy of LA FÊTE À HENRIETTE, Duvivier maintained a master’s touch that won him the admiration of titans like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, who declared, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.”