Duvivier's final silent film is a modern retelling of Zola's panoramic chronicle of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian society, centering on a small fabric shop struggling to survive in the shadow of a luxury department store. With expressionistic shades of Erich von Stroheim and G. W. Pabst (Duvivier worked for a time in the German film industry), Au bonheur captures the rhythms of urban life-and the pleasures of bourgeois consumer culture, with its obsessions with fashion and image-while also creating a stinging portrait of capitalist ruthlessness, class tensions, and sexual competition. “An orgy of pure cinema, from its opening train shot to its climactic visual effect of a magically converted storefront. Filming . . . in and around the Galeries Lafayette, Duvivier pulls out every trick in the book-elaborate crane and tracking shots; massive crowd scenes; surreal, constructivist montages-for this alternately sincere and cynical hymn to capitalist endeavor” (Scott Foundas, Village Voice).