Anatole Litvak

Anatole Litvak (born May 10, 1902, Kiev, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—died December 15, 1974, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) was a Ukrainian-born film director who worked in a variety of genres and whose notable credits included film noirs, war documentaries, and crime dramas.

Early work

Litvak, born into a Jewish family, began acting in his teens at an experimental theatre in St. Petersburg. In 1923 he started working in film, directing short features for Nordkino studios. Two years later he left Russia for Germany and continued his film career there until the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s convinced him to flee to Paris. He then directed several British and French films, most notably Mayerling (1936) with Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, the success of which took him to Hollywood. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940.

The Hollywood years

Litvak’s first American film was The Woman I Love (1937), a World War I drama made at RKO. It starred Miriam Hopkins, whom Litvak later married (divorced 1939), and Paul Muni. Litvak then signed with Warner Brothers, and his first film for the studio was Tovarich (1937). The popular comedy starred Boyer and Claudette Colbert as Russian aristocrats who, during the Russian Revolution of 1917, flee to Paris, where they work as domestics while safeguarding the tsar’s fortune. Next came The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), an entertaining crime drama starring Edward G. Robinson as a doctor whose investigations into the criminal mind lead him to join a group of thieves; however, he soon angers the group’s leader (played by Humphrey Bogart).

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In The Sisters (1938), a solid drama set in the early 1900s, Bette Davis played a woman unhappily married to a reporter (Errol Flynn) while her siblings (Anita Louise and Jane Bryan) struggle with their own problems. More topical was Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), with Robinson as an FBI agent investigating an American Nazi organization and its leader (Paul Lukas). Litvak then made Castle on the Hudson (1940), a remake of Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), with John Garfield as a jewel thief sentenced to prison and Ann Sheridan as his girlfriend. Litvak was next given a more prestigious production, the lavish All This, and Heaven Too (1940), which was based on a popular novel by Rachel Field about a governess (Davis) who falls in love with her employer (Boyer) and is later implicated in the murder of his possessive wife (Barbara O’Neil). The drama received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and it was Warners’ biggest moneymaker that year.

Litvak’s next film was City for Conquest (1940), a gritty melodrama, with James Cagney as a boxer who sacrifices everything so that his younger brother (Arthur Kennedy) can continue his career as a musician; Sheridan was cast as Cagney’s girlfriend, and Elia Kazan appeared in a small but colourful role as a gangster. Out of the Fog (1941) was an atmospheric rendering of Irwin Shaw’s play The Gentle People; Garfield was cast in the unsympathetic role of a gangster preying on Brooklyn waterfront fishermen. In 1941 Litvak also directed Blues in the Night, an ambitious but ultimately inadequate drama about the stressful lives of jazz musicians and their girlfriends.

Litvak left Warner Brothers for Twentieth Century-Fox, but he only made one picture, the patriotic This Above All (1942) with Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine, before joining the army’s Special Service Division during World War II. There he worked with Frank Capra on the Why We Fight series of documentaries, codirecting (uncredited) Prelude to War (1942), The Nazis Strike (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Russia (1943), The Battle of China (1944), and War Comes to America (1945).

After the war, Litvak returned to Hollywood and directed The Long Night (1947), a film noir that opens with a man (Henry Fonda) barricading himself in his apartment after killing someone; through flashbacks it is revealed how he ended up in the situation. The picture was a box-office failure for RKO, but Litvak’s production of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a noir classic, was a huge hit. Burt Lancaster starred alongside Barbara Stanwyck, who was Oscar-nominated for her intense performance as a paranoid, psychosomatically crippled heiress who, while on the telephone, overhears plans for a murder and only later realizes that she is the intended victim.

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The Snake Pit (1948) was a harrowing account of treatment in a mental institution. Olivia de Havilland, who prepared for her role by joining Litvak in observing a mental facility’s day-to-day operations, was nominated for an Academy Award. The film’s other nominations included best picture, and Litvak received his only nod for best director. That triumph was followed by the thriller Decision Before Dawn (1951), with Oskar Werner as a German prisoner of war who agrees to spy on the Nazis for the United States during World War II. Litvak, having returned to living in France in 1949, used authentic German locations to lend verisimilitude to the picture.

Later films

Many of Litvak’s subsequent films were European productions. Un Acte d’amour (1953; Act of Love) was the mundane tale of a U.S. soldier (Kirk Douglas) romancing a young French woman (Dany Robin) in Paris, and The Deep Blue Sea (1955), based on a play by Terence Rattigan, starred Vivien Leigh as a suicidal woman who has left her husband to live with another man but remains trapped in despair. Anastasia (1956) was Litvak’s best film of the decade. Ingrid Bergman portrayed an amnesiac refugee who impersonates Nicholas II’s long-lost daughter at the behest of a con man (Yul Brynner). It was Bergman’s first American film in seven years, and she won an Academy Award (her second) for best actress. Brynner worked with Litvak again in The Journey (1959), an overlong drama set in Budapest after the 1956 revolution; he played a communist officer who falls in love with an English noblewoman (Deborah Kerr) who is desperate to escape to unoccupied Vienna.

Goodbye Again (1961) offered Bergman as an interior decorator who, upset that her longtime boyfriend (Yves Montand) continually cheats, begins romancing a much-younger man (Anthony Perkins). Le Couteau dans la plaie (1963; Five Miles to Midnight) was a murder drama, in which Perkins portrayed an abusive husband who tries to pull an insurance scam with the help of his wife (Sophia Loren). The Night of the Generals (1967), which centred on the murder of a prostitute in Warsaw during World War II, starred Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Christopher Plummer. Last came the psychological thriller The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970), with Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed. Litvak subsequently retired from filmmaking.