"La fin du jour" or "The End of the Day" is a French French-language live action film from 1939, so this one has its 85th anniversary next year, which sadly also means that everybody who was a part of this project is long dead and gone. The movie runs for approximately 105 minutes, so is as close to the 1.5-hour mark as it is to two hours, which means that it is not a short film by any means. If you guessed from the year 1939 that this would be a black-and-white sound film, then you guessed correctly. If course, there are also color films from that era like "The Wizard of Oz" or several German movies, but still color in the 1930s and 1940s is really the exception and the silent era was also gone by then already and you can even say that the transition phase was also over as this is a clean sound film with dialogues on so many occasions. Sound films from earlier years sometimes still felt a bit on the struggling side with long periods of silence and low sound quality in general. This is not the issue here. I had other issues with the outcome though as you can see from my relatively low rating. I cannot by any means agree with this movie's solid imdb rating of almost 8/10, even if not even 1,000 people rated it. Still way too high. I watched this film today on the occasion of a Julien Duvivier retrospective. I guess not too many are familiar with the name, especially if we are looking outside France, and I include myself there as well. I think this film meant closure to the retrospective this evening and there were many shown in fact, even if I did not see too many. "Pépé le Moko" was also not great, but solid and surely better than this one here. Duvivier was in his early 40s when he directed this movie here briefly before the beginning of World War II. He is also one of the two writers credited here and the other would be the slightly younger Charles Spaak from Belgium. It is not the only time that Spaak and Duvivier collaborated on a film (screenplay) and Spaak also worked with other defining filmmakers from their era such as Jean Renoir.
I am a bit surprised to see this film make some waves in terms of awards recognition in America. The nomination in Venice does not surprise me too much, interesting name of the trophy though Mussolini Cup, but this film being nominated by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review in the foreign language categories is quite something. With the latter, it even won, but then again, if we look closely, then it was more of a nomination as another (French) film took home the actual prize, but all the other foreign film nominees are listed as winners too. Pretty generous. The one that won by the way is the one that had Michel Simon in his cast too and he won an acting award for the two films combined, this one here and the foreign language film category winner. I mean he wasn't bad or anything in this movie we have here, but I suppose he must be better in the other to justify this recognition. As for this one here, he was still among the most memorable aspects, maybe even the most memorable aspect and best performance. The way he/his character looked surely helped. I cannot really go into detail here about all the cast members, simply because I am not too familiar with the majority of actors that were part of this movie. I shall leave that to the French film historians perhaps. I see they were all fairly prolific, even if none of them really had a big breakthrough in American if I am not mistaken. So yeah, Francen, Simon and Jouvet are the three cast members with the biggest impact. Everybody else is supporting I suppose. Maybe for one or two of those you can also make an argument that they are not lead because there is not really one definite lead in this movie.
On the occasion of this retrospective, there was a little introductory speech before the film and there the man elaborated a bit on the actors and that they have worked together previously, also on the stage, and that they were gently-speaking not the very best friends and even convinced the makers of this film to keep the number of scenes in which they share the screen with one another as low as possible. So you can surely wonder to what extent, in those moments when they shared it, the actual actors were really having a go at each other in a serious way or if it was really just their characters and how they were written. Maybe something in-between. I also do not really remember in detail who did not get along with whom, but I am sure you can find this information somewhere if you really care. There were also females in this film, but they never really amounted to anything significant story-wise other than being romantic interests to other characters. This applies especially to the stunning Madeleine Ozeray and Gaby André, who sadly did not reach a truly old age. André I mean. Ozeray's character's story here reminded me a bit of Faust and Mephisto and Gretchen with her being Gretchen of course and with Jouvet's character being the other two in one person pretty much. He was clearly also the main antagonist this film had with his shenanigans and how he saw himself as some Don Juan. Towards the end, he really loses it all as we find out and is taken to a sanatorium then, but also way before that he was not particularly likable. So two characters are gone eventually and the other one is Simon's who has even died. This came out of nowhere. Honestly, I would have thought that maybe the guy who he knocked down there would die from the effects, but nope it was Simon's character. Looking at how they treated him there after he messes up his performance (and thus the entire play), it feels a bit embarrassing too and hypocritical how highly they speak of him at his funeral. Or well, they only do for a while and then the truth must out that he was really a nice bloke and dedicated fella when it comes to acting, but the greatest talent he was not. This is already a really nice way to say it. But yeah, even with this death, it is still in a way a happy ending overall because of the nice words they have for the deceased and also because the young girl is alive.
By the way, looking at the cast here, I see that many of the (French) actors went by single names and this is something that feels really new to me. I saw that already at the beginning of the screening when all the names of the credits were written on the screen. Back then, it was more common to do so at the start of the movie and not at the very end. The notice that the film is over came fairly abrupt at the end then right after the funeral speech was over. I had a difficult time here to develop an interest in the story at all. Took me quite some time to start caring, much longer than it usually does, and in-between there were also always segments that did very little for me, not to say nothing. The last scene also did not feel memorable to me and yeah, as I stated earlier, one character's death came too abrupt for my liking. In the middle of the film, I felt like I could appreciate the outcome more and go for a positive recommendation, especially in the scene when everybody is informed that their home will close soon and that there will be no piano wherever they will be going etc. But this was also not handled took competently afterwards with how pretty much out of nowhere this issue is solved and we find out that they are all allowed to stay and so not have to move elsewhere. I actually liked the brief inclusion of this elderly couple who have been together for a really long time despite not being married and seeing them explain their problem with relocating, namely having to split up perhaps, was among the best scenes of the film for me. They were also fairly cute together. A bit of a shame that the film did not elaborate more on them. This was really an area where it felt shoddy altogether. We have this young couple, the only romance that seems to go right in this film, who announce their engagement towards the end, but we literally knew nothing about these two characters as they were included only once very briefly on an earlier occasion and yet I had a feeling as if the filmmaker(s) here wanted us to care deeply for them and be really happy about the engagement. It is not even the problem how quickly they got engaged. I knew times were different back then.
Or I could mention a few more scenes that had a hard time winning me over. Just take the one when we see two of the centra characters together and we understand one "stole" the other's wife or partner a few years ago and said female had died already in an accident or so and there the one man just wants to know that his previous significant other was happy before she died and the other guy confirms it, but has to swear on his mother that he tells the truth. Looking at his face expression, I am not sure if he really did say the truth. He was definitely no man of morals, so we cannot be sure. But the other dude having forgiven the man and also having forgiven the woman felt exaggerated and not super realistic. His last words in this scene also did not impress me. It was supposed to be an emotional scene, but it did not touch me one bit. Maybe just me. Then I would also say eventually that I think the editing between the scenes was not too good and the switching over from one location to the next did feel a bit rocky or not smooth at all. Perhaps it was just the copy we were watching. I am not sure. But I am not fairy sure that I give the outcome a thumbs-down. Except the two aforementioned girls' looks and maybe the old couple and Simon's performance (a Trump lookalike by the way), there is nothing too good here. The forgettable and occasionally even weak aspects outnumber the strengths by far. Skip this one. This is neither a success as a character study nor as drama movie and the brief comedic inclusions also made nobody really smile, if they even were supposed to do so. Not recommended.
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