Andre' Cayatte Biography
André Cayatte (1909 - 1989) was a French writer and director. Before starting his directorial career as a screenwriter in Marc Allégret's The Entrance of the Artists (1938), André Cayatte distinguished himself in a completely different profession: the lawyer. It is also during a trial between a producer and a film star that Maître Cayatte decides to abandon the role to launch himself into the seventh art. His first film as director, La Fausse mistress (adapted from Balzac's work), demonstrates his real care in staging. During the war he made more than 2 films for "Continental Films", a German-run production company. There he conducts courses as a director, which causes him problems at the time of the Liberation of French territory. In fact, condemned by the Committee for the Liberation of Cinema to a lifetime ban from practicing the profession, he ignored it and continued with adaptations of French classics, then popular films such as Roger La Honte (1946) or Les amants de Vérone (1949). From 1950 he began a cycle of judicial films that would make him famous. These are Justice Done (1950), We Are All Murderers (1952), Before the Flood (1953), The Black Folder (1954). He thus becomes the champion of the dossier film, which can also be defined as the thesis film. After some melodramas (The Mirror with Two Faces, 1958), he returned to social themes with The Risks of Work (1967), then Morire d'Amare (1971) which enjoyed enormous success. The end of his career is less brilliant, but it is a continuation of his previous work.
