LGM Film Club, Part 555: David Golder

Julien Duviver’s groundbreaking 1930 film David Golder is a strange one. It’s groundbreaking in that it made Duvivier’s career, but also was one of the first major sound production in France. It also made a major screen star out of Harry Baur, an incredibly expressive actor who became a major star in the 30s despite his age, before being stupidly in Berlin to make a film in 1942 where the Gestapo caught up with him (not sure of all the details on this). But this film, about a greedy Jewish businessman with an even more greedy and parasitic family sponging off him before he tries to escape both business and family when his health fails, feels like it goes pretty deep into anti-Semitic tropes, especially in the first half when he’s the grasping capitalist.

Now, you might say, well, it’s 1930 France. Yes, but the film is an adaptation of Irène Némirovsky’s book of the same title. And this is where it gets weird. Némirovsky was Jewish. But she hated it. She became a far-right French nationalist and Catholic convert in the 1930s, but then the French denied her citizenship as a stateless Jew and the Nazis grabbed her and she died in Auschwitz in 1942. So yeah, there’s a lot of self-hatred going on here and it comes through in the adapation clearly enough.

I wouldn’t say this is a particularly fun film given the context, but it is quite a window into a very bad time in Europe when some horrible things were about to happen and you can see it getting teed up here by the future victims.

The only piece of this film that’s on YouTube is in French, so sorry. I own the Duvivier box set that Criterion released in its Eclipse series, which I wish it would revive more often since these are key collections of largely forgotten films.