David Golder

Duvivier's first sound film was also a key film in his oeuvre. His adaptation of the debut novel by the Jewish-Ukrainian writer Irène Némirovsky, who wrote in French, is a somber masterpiece: The title character David Golder (Harry Baur) is a wealthy businessman, who is perceived by his wife and daughter mainly as the guarantor of their life of luxury in Biarritz. When he has a breakdown and subsequent crisis of purpose, triggered by the suicide of a business partner whom he unscrupulously drove to ruin, they are horrified. In this unfathomable work,  capitalism comes across as cynically and inhumanely as communism. It is a film that deals with the anti-Semitism of the time and makes the small bliss of love come across like a cheap, albeit costly, bourgeois fantasy – yet it still manages to leave the audience with a vulnerable belief in humanism at the end. (re/fl)