Lovers of Paris

Julien Duvivier's film is adapted from the novel by Émile Zola. Octave Mouret, young, handsome and thoroughly calculating, arrives in Paris from the provinces and decides that the route upward runs through women. The apartment building he moves into carries the whole story: a different family on every floor, something concealed in every family, and an arrangement on the staircase in which everyone watches everyone. Zola's attack on bourgeois morality survives intact, and the gap between respectability as seen from outside and life behind the doors is what drives the narrative. Gérard Philipe plays it as attractive and cold at once. Danielle Darrieux and Dany Carrel are in the cast.