Le cas des mélodrames princiers : vers l’affirmation d’une européanité dans le cinéma français des années 1930 ?

Abstract

The goal of this contribution is to portray a number of success movies, that I propose to label “princes melodramas”, as the possible signs of the birth of a cinema industry at the same time French and European. The 1936 triumph of Mayerling by Anatole Litvak, produced by Seymour Nebenzahl’s Nero Film was followed by the successes of Maurice Tourneur’s Katia (1938) and Max Ophüls’ De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940). These movies benefitted from the presence of Russian and German exiles in the French movie industry, and showed their ability to create and boost in France big-budget internationally oriented features with European added value.

Keywords

• film crew
• French cinema of the 1930s
• exile
• European coproduction
• Anatole Litvak
• Danielle Darrieux