Jean Becker

Jean Becker built a long and varied career in French mainstream cinema and in advertising. Ginette Vincendeau's archive text records two Jean-Paul Belmondo adventure thrillers he directed in the sixties, and notes that in Britain he is known mostly for Élisa and One Deadly Summer. The text's real finding is a family tree: The Children of the Marshland is a nostalgic return to the cinema of his father, Jacques Becker. For Vincendeau the films of the father, Jacques Becker, exalt the old-fashioned values of popular communities and male friendship, and the son has placed a deliberate gesture towards him inside the film. The same text finds the tension and surprise peculiar to the screenwriter who also wrote One Deadly Summer entirely absent from this newer one.