Background
André Cayatte was born on 3 February 1909 in Carcassonne, Languedoc-Roussillon, France.
André Cayatte was born on 3 February 1909 in Carcassonne, Languedoc-Roussillon, France.
His first involvement with films was as a scriptwriter: Entrée des Artistes (38, Marc Allégret); Remorques (41, Jean Grémillon); Caprices (41, Leo Joannon); and Le Camion Blanc (42, Joannon). Cayatte’s own work returned with grim fervor to attacks on capital punishment, skeptical examinations ol justice, and humane generalizations: Justice est Faite; Nous Sommes Tous des Assassins; Oeil pour Oeil; Le Passage du Rhin; and Le Glaive et la Balance. These five are not as trenchant or subtle as one reel from Fun/ or Anatomy of a Murder, but Cavatte was a reformer and bis role as a voice of protest in France should not be underestimated. His films are mundane because their messages are unequivocal; it is the actual French context that gives them bite.
More interesting are his tender, brooding accounts of young love: Les Amants de Vérone, written by Jacques Prévert, with Anouk and Serge Reggiani blighted by odious family repression and charmed by the romance of the movie world; and La Vie Conjugale, with Jacques Charrier and Marie-Jose Nat fretting at the bonds of society. Cayatte always seemed a man of the 1930s, and his love stories aspire to the awful resignation of You Only Live Once (37, Fritz Lang) but are kept short of Lang’s vivid pessimism by the muddy constructivism of a lawyer turned filmmaker.