Introduction: we need to talk about Julien

When the French cinema dies, it might do worse than find his [Duvivier’s] name written across its retina. (Alistair Cooke 1971: 125) No one speaks of Julien Duvivier without apologising. (Dudley Andrew 1997: 283) Once upon a time, Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) was considered one of the world’s great film directors. He was beloved by Orson Welles, Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Capra, and John Ford, while Ingmar Bergman once admitted that, of all the careers that he would have liked to have had, it would be Duvivier’s. The English novelist Graham Greene, in a much-quoted article from 1938, rated Duvivier and Fritz Lang as ‘the two greatest fiction directors still at work’ (1972: 195). ...