Geez, this blog seems to be developing a sub-theme that it seems I’d be well-advised to nip in the bud. I’ll work on that. In the meantime, above is the great Dita Parlo (whose name was most egregiously taken in vain by Madonna in what was, to my mind, the woman’s most unforgivable sin), several years before VIgo’s L’Atalante, failing to understand what’s expected of her when she takes a job at a massive women’s department store in Julien Duvivier’s very diverting 1930 Au bonheur des dames. The picture is the subject of today’s Foreign DVD Report, so named this week because the French disc of this film is generously region-free. At The Auteurs’.
I got to see this on the big screen at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival about three years ago. I had no idea what to expect but I was quite impressed and am hoping to see more Duvivier films.
It’s a pretty impressive final silent from Duvivier and I think it could nicely share DVD space with his first talkie and next picture, David Golder from the Irene Nemirovski novel of the same year. His whole 30s period is revelatory and unfirmoaly fine, and often masterful – I regard hm as one of the top four French directors of the decade with Renoir, Gremillon and Carne (not forgetting the all too short career of Vigo of course.) LOTS more needs to be said about Duviv but it really is a case of getting the films out there – a lot but not all the thirties pictures have been restored and there are a number of subtitle files hanging around the ether for them.
For the sharply observant there’s a brief glimpse of Dita Parlo’s nipple in one scene, althoguh it’s not as sustained a shot as her topless bathing scene in Kirsanoff’s Rapt from 1934. Duviv gives us even more nipples in the form of bare breasted Flamenco dancers who share the space in a seedy Barcelona dive with very rough looking drag queen in his terrific 1935 La Bandera. Gabin occupies the center of this chaotic scene seemingly not knowing which way to turn between the naked ladies and the not-so-ladies. It’s a riot.