Louis Delluc’s short story “Tulip’s Bar” first appeared on 1 July 1919 in the satirical magazine Fantasio, and later, retitled “La Tulipe”, was included in L’Homme des bars, a collection of short stories (Éditions de la Pensée française, December 1923). The story became the script for La Boue (equivalent to “muck”, the initial title of Fièvre), published in Drames de cinéma, revealing the extremely concise style that characterizes Delluc’s cine-dramas. “Readers will get enough sense of the scenes, and their balance,” he explained. “It is imagination, backed up by intelligence, that will bring the images alive, at the desired distance and in the desired proportion, according to the desired movement. Likewise, the director will use his professional methods almost automatically, just as a writer puts his thoughts into verbal form without resorting to a dictionary.”
Produced by Alhambra-Film, a production company founded by Delluc, La Boue was shot in just eight days, in February 1921, at Gaumont’s Buttes-Chaumont studios in Paris. The set for the popular cabaret in Marseille was built in four days; the few port scenes that provide the counterpoint to the closed universe of the cabaret were filmed on location in the Vieux-Port of Marseille. Delluc called on amateurs, including some friends, to play the many vital secondary parts, filling out the roles of stars such as Edmond Van Daële, Gaston Modot, Ève Francis, and Elena Sagrary. They provide a complete immersion in the film’s atmosphere, fully inhabiting the space with the distinct personalities assigned them by the director. As for the leads, notwithstanding the icy winter temperatures on set, their fervor increases as the plot unfolds. Delluc shot the scenes in the order of the screenplay (except for the wedding of Militis, set in the past), thus respecting unity of time and place and enhancing the gradually rising tension and violence.
Performances are sober and splendid, and the pace is breathless. Delluc sets up a picture that comes to life instantly, and so intensely that the realism is truly striking. Each character struggles with their solitude, in an atmosphere that’s closed, confused, and perverted, tinged by melodies from Hindustan straight out of a player piano. Delluc blends yearning, fantasy, mystery, and the magic of travel with nostalgia, ennui, and dreams. Tension mounts and quickly becomes poisonous before drunkenness and folly overturn reality, abruptly and with sordid banality.
In April 1921 La Boue was presented to the French censorship board, eliciting strong objections from representatives of the Ministry of the Interior. The censors found it disturbing that the action took place in a “dive”, and demanded not only the cutting of certain scenes regarded as subversive (violence, Vintiane’s exposed breast), but also a change of title, which was judged too provocative. It was thus in censored form, lacking some scenes, that the film was finally accepted by the board in May 1921, now retitled Fièvre. First screened on 8 June, it was released in theatres on 24 September 1921.
The public found the film beguiling, and critics raved. Léon Moussinac asserted in Le Crapouillot that Delluc was “inside cinematic truth… The image is absolutely self-sufficient, with only strictly indispensable textual interventions”, while Paul de la Borie wrote in La Liberté that “Behind every gesture, every look, every nuance of thought or action of the film’s protagonists lies the author’s intelligence, as he pursues his goal and strives for the planned effect. And that is why, without any doubt, we have never seen a cinematic drama rise to this level of intense expression. Directed with such meticulous care for art – more cerebral than plastic – and performed by artists such as Ève Francis, Elena Sagrary, Van Daële, and Modot, all endowed with an inner fire, this film – cinematically speaking – is admirable. It is, in any case, unforgettable.”
The Cinémathèque française restored Fièvre from a nitrate negative, deposited in 1943, and from a period release print acquired by the Cinémathèque in 1950. In 1963, the Cinémathèque saved the original negative, creating a safety print. In 2008, a new print of Fièvre was made from the 1963 copy, with original intertitles reintroduced from the nitrate. This same nitrate copy served as a reference point for the tinting.

Samantha Leroy