The Heart of a Nation

In 1871, Paris fell to the German armies, and the father of a sister and two brothers never returned. To their village of Montmartre. This film is about the sister, Suzy Prim, and her baby brothers, played by Louis Jouvet, their sometimes wealthy uncle from Marseilles, Raimu, the girl they both loved but only one married, Michèle Morgan, their children, their children's children, and the their wives and husbands through the end of the Phony War in 1940.

Julien Duvivier directed most of this in 1940, but could not release it because by the time it was ready, the Germans were in Paris. He took it with him to the United States, worked on it some more with expatriates like Mlle Morgan and Charles Boyer. It finally premiered in France in the fall of 1945, although not in the version I looked at.

Because it takes place over the course of almost 70 years, it seems to ramble, but it's the tale of the growth of a family, from illiterate farmers through teachers, ending with a medical doctor, the growth of the bourgeois middle class from peasant roots, always hoping for peace and a chance to tend their own affairs, and those of their nation thereby. Jouvet doesn't look like Jouvet in this one, and Raimu doesn't dominate, although he's playing his wonted comical-tragic character. Surprising to me for a Duvivier film, it's the women who draw the audience's eyes: Mlle Prim, an old maid from raising her brothers, and Mlle Morgan, coming to tell Jouvet of their son's death. There's no magical realism here, no femme fatale, just a heartfelt hope that peace may be restored, and the pear tree that the father tended will produce fruit for his great-great-grandchildren.