Julien Duvivier was a Golden Age French film director active from the 1919 to the 1960s. He made a name for himself in the 1930s as the director of a series of films treating people on the down and out with a light touch. In Poil de carotte (1932), based on the novel by Jules Renard, a redheaded boy shunned by his parents makes his way in the world. Le paquebot Tenacity (S.S. Tenacity, 1934) shows two adventurers stuck in port trying to make their way to Canada (where there is less competition than in the United States), but falling in love in the meantime. In Un carnet de bal (Dance Program, 1937), a melodramatic mixture of pathos and comedy, a woman tracks down the men from her first dance card twenty years earlier.