... when a film by Julien Duvivier featuring heavy hitters Raimu, Louis Jouvet, Michele Morgan, Suzy Prim, Fernand Ledoux and Robert Le Vigan would not have disappointed my French friend quite so much. We tend to agree more than we disagree and are both great admirers of Duvivier but this time we differ slightly. Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing and 20-20 hindsight is much sought-after. I'm inclined to think that as he was shooting this in 1940 Duvivier knew he was leaving France to stay in America for what must have seemed indefinitely so he chose to shoot not so much a film as a valentine to his homeland. My friend has also pointed out that Duvivier is at his best with less sprawling canvasses and it's true that the picaresque is not his natural habitat but as a non-French lover of French movies I revelled in the company of some of the very finest actors that France had to offer illustrating a painless history lesson spanning seventy years, indeed it may well have been subtitled 70 Glorious Years.

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.