This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943)

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak, Kent Smith, Una O'Connor, Philip Merivale, Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Nancy Gates, Ivan F. Simpson, John Donat. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Frederick Knudtson. Music: Lothar Perl.

Charles Laughton plays a cowardly mama's boy schoolteacher in a Nazi-occupied country not unlike director Jean Renoir's native France. Albert Lory is secretly in love with his fellow teacher, Louise (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to George Lambert (George Sanders), the administrator of the local railway yard who thinks the best way to proceed under the occupation is to submit to the Nazis under the command of Major von Keller (Walter Slezak). But Louise's brother, Paul (Kent Smith), is a member of the Resistance who tries to assassinate von Keller, provoking reprisals -- and a good deal of plot complications -- when he fails. Some dubious casting -- Sanders and O'Hara make an odd couple -- and a too-heavy reliance on melodramatic posing undermine a film that seems aimed more at Renoir's compatriots than at American audiences, though it was a box office success. 

French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)

Henri Danglard: Jean Gabin
Nini: Françoise Arnoul
Lola: Maria Félix
Esther Georges: Anna Amendola
Baron Walter: Jean-Roger Caussimon
La Génisse: Dora Doll
Prince Alexandre: Giani Esposito
Oscar: Gaston Gabaroche
Bidon: Jacques Jouanneau
Coudrier: Jean Parédès
Paulo: Franco Pastorino
Eleonore: Michèle Philippe
Le Capitaine Valorgueil: Michel Piccoli
Eugénie Buffet: Édith Piaf
Yvette Guilbert: Patachou

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Michel Kelber
Production design: Max Douy
Film editing: Boris Lewin
Music: Georges Van Parys
Costume design: Rosine Delamare

The Moulin Rouge is a kind of metonymy for the Parisian Belle Époque, that period of French culture that forms the core of Marcel Proust's fiction and represents an efflorescence of the arts before the disaster of World War I, which is why the cabaret has been the setting of so many movies, including at least half a dozen that bear its name in the title. So it's entirely fitting that Jean Renoir, whose father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was so prominent a figure in the Belle Époque, should have chosen the Moulin Rouge as the setting for a film that marked his return to working in France after an exile that began in 1940. The central story of French Cancan is bogus: The Moulin Rouge was not founded by Henri Danglard, who is a made-up figure. But since he's played by Jean Gabin, the greatest of French movie stars, it doesn't really matter. Gabin gives a solidity to the character that few actors can muster. It's a lavish, riotously colorful movie, a heavily fictionalized treatment of the founding of the nightclub, and one of the best film musicals ever made. It's also a celebration of a certain kind of French insouciance about sex, a gleeful nose-thumbing at puritan moralizers.

La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Jean Gabin and Julien Carette in La Bête Humaine

Jacques Lantier: Jean Gabin
Séverine Roubaud: Simone Simon
Roubaud: Fernand Ledoux
Flore: Blanchette Brunoy
Grandmorin: Jacques Berlioz
Pecqueux: Julien Carette
Victoire Pecqueux: Colette Régis
Cabuche: Jean Renoir

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Denise Leblond
Based on a novel by Émile Zola
Cinematography: Curt Courant
Production design: Eugène Lourié
Film editing: Suzanne de Troeye, Marguerite Renoir

Jean Gabin has been called "the French Clark Gable," perhaps because he has some of the charged virility we associate with Gable. But it seems to me that he possesses in equal, or even greater, measure the quiet, sometimes gruff integrity as an actor that we associate with Spencer Tracy. It's very much on display in La Bête Humaine, in which he underplays the role of the doomed Jacques Lantier, making us feel the solidity of the man rather than the inherited demons that Émile Zola's novel inflicted on him. (Perhaps he underplays a bit too much for some people, like Pauline Kael, who found him sometimes "a lump.") In any case, the star of the film is not so much Gabin as the train whose engine Lantier has affectionately named Lison and regards as female. Throughout La Bête Humaine, we see trains rushing down the tracks and surging through tunnels or hear their roar and rumble and shrieking whistles. The film is driven by the energy of trains almost more than by the passions of the characters. In a close adherence to Zola's biological determinism, the trains would be emblematic of unstoppable, mechanistic destiny, but Jean Renoir has tempered Zola's naturalism with his own humanism. Renoir's nods to Zola's determinism are perfunctory: The scene in which Lantier reverts to the darkness of his ancestors and starts to strangle Flore is an awkward way of introducing Zola's ideas. But whenever the passions of the characters come most to the forefront, as in the murders of Grandmorin and Séverine, Renoir's tendency is to look away: Grandmorin dies behind the closed curtains of a railway compartment, and Lantier's assault on Séverine is interrupted by cuts to the dance hall they have left behind. What I remember from the film is less the crushing force of destiny that overwhelms the characters than the irrepressible elements of ordinary life, epitomized in the camaraderie of Lantier and Pecqueux, and reinforced by the film's ending when Pecqueux stops the hurtling train and returns to find his dead friend and gently close his eyes.

Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Grand Illusion

Maréchal: Jean Gabin
Boeldieu: Pierre Fresnay
Rauffenstein: Erich von Stroheim
Rosenthal: Marcel Dalio
Elsa: Dita Parlo
Cartier: Julien Carette
An Engineer: Gaston Modot
A Teacher: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Production design: Eugène Lourié
Music: Joseph Kosma

I have to confess that when I first saw Grand Illusion a long, long time ago, I didn't get what the fuss was about. Why was this mildly amusing prison-escape movie considered one of the greatest films of all time? I mean, I got the general idea: That people are the same everywhere and that what divides us more than nationality is class. But where was the action? Why was there so little suspense? Why don't we get the raucous humor of Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953) or the heroics of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)? All of which is to say that our expectations have been so shaped by Hollywood to the point that it's difficult for the casual filmgoer to fully appreciate the subtlety of Jean Renoir's treatment of a story about which we have so many preconceptions. The greatness of Grand Illusion consists in Renoir's understanding of people and in his cast's dedication to bringing depth to the roles they are playing. To expect Grand Illusion to give us the full Hollywood measure of laughter, thrills and tears is like expecting War and Peace to stop teaching us history and concentrate entirely on the love life of Natasha Rostova. Like a great novel, Grand Illusion is designed to be savored and reflected upon, not to be watched and swiftly forgotten. The rapport between enemies, i.e., Boeldieu and Rauffenstein, and the tension between allies, i.e., Maréchal and Rosenthal, is what the film is about, and not Boeldieu's self-sacrifice and Rauffenstein's pomposity. It's also why we don't have closure on the stories of Maréchal and Rosenthal: Do they survive the war? Does Maréchal return to Elsa? Does Rosenthal become a victim of the Nazis? It's only because they have become such real characters to us that we even feel a twinge of frustration at not knowing those things. Hence the irony of the film's title. Hollywood gave us illusions. Renoir is determined to let us see the realities behind them.

The Lower Depths (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet in The Lower Depths

Pépel: Jean Gabin
The Baron: Louis Jouvet
Vassilissa: Suzy Prim
Natasha: Junie Astor
Kostylev: Vladimir Sokoloff
Louka: René Génin
Nastia: Jany Holt
The Actor: Robert Le Vigan
The Police Inspector: André Gabriello
Felix: Léon Larive
Anna: Nathalie Alexeeff

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Yevgeni Zamyatin, Jacques Companéez, Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak
Based on the play by Maxim Gorky
Cinematography: Fédote Bourgasoff

Jean Renoir's encompassing humanism might have seemed the right sensibility to apply to Maxim Gorky's play about society's castoffs, who live in a crowded flophouse. But Renoir can't avoid "opening up" the play, which takes place entirely in the dingy living quarters and presents the continual conflicts and squabbles among the inhabitants and their greedy landlord. He chooses to begin with the backstory of one of the inhabitants, a baron so addicted to gambling that he has lost his entire fortune. Pépel, a thief who pays his rent at the flophouse by letting the landlord serve as fence for the stolen goods, one night decides to rob the baron's house, unaware that the baron is bankrupt and the authorities are in the process of repossessing everything he owns. When the baron discovers Pépel robbing him, he just laughs and invites Pépel to sit down to supper. The two make friends over the misery of their lives, and the baron moves into the flophouse too. It's a scene of sophisticated comedy that starts the film far away from the madness of the play. Renoir also provides a kind of happy ending, in which Pépel, after serving time in prison for killing the landlord, hits the road with Natasha, the late landlord's sister-in-law -- a sharp contrast to the play's ending, an ironic moment in which news of the death of one of the inhabitants interrupts a raucous song. Renoir maintained that Gorky had approved of the screenplay, but the film was not released until December 1936 and Gorky died in June of that year, so his opinion of the completed film can't be known. The film is really a reinterpretation of the play in the light of the political turmoil of the mid-1930s in France and the struggle of the Popular Front against the fascists. If it's more Renoir than Gorky, it's still satisfying in large part because of the performances of Louis Jouvet as the baron and Jean Gabin as Pépel, an odd couple whose scenes together are the heart of the film. The ensemble is mostly terrific except for Junie Astor, whose limited range of expressions never brings Natasha to life, and whose pencil-line eyebrows seem out of place on the face of a character who has been bullied into being a scrubwoman in a flophouse. Inevitably, Renoir's The Lower Depths has been compared to Akira Kurosawa's 1957 version, which sticks much more closely to the play. Renoir himself thought Kurosawa's film "more important" than his, and I find it hard to argue otherwise, but it's nice to have two versions by two master filmmakers.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Collection 

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936)

René Lefèvre in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

Amédée Lange: René Lefèvre
Valentine: Florelle
Batala: Jules Berry
The Concierge: Marcel Lévesque
The Concierge's Wife: Odette Talazac
Meunier's Son: Henri Guisol
Charles: Maurice Baquet
Edith: Sylvia Bataille
Estelle: Nadia Sibirskaia

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Castanier, Jacques Prévert, Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Jean Bachelet

M. Lange's crime is murder, and he gets away with it. This droll dark comedy is a vehicle for Jean Renoir's anti-fascist politics, and to enjoy it to the fullest you probably have to have been there -- "there" being Europe in 1936. But it still resonates 80-plus years later with its story of a little guy exploited by a venal fat cat. Lange, who writes adventure stories about "Arizona Jim" in the wild West, works for a greedy, corrupt publisher named Batala, who not only stiffs him on a contract to publish the stories, but also inserts advertising plugs into the story itself, making Arizona Jim pause to pop one of the sponsor's pills before launching into action. Batala is also a shameless womanizer who impregnates Estelle, the girlfriend of Charles, the bicycle messenger who works for him. (In a rather cold-hearted twist you probably won't see in movies today, everyone rejoices when the baby dies.) Fleeing from his creditors, Batala reportedly dies in a train wreck, and to salvage their jobs, his employees, encouraged by Meunier, the son of Batala's chief creditor, form a cooperative to run the publishing company. It's a huge success, with Lange's stories becoming incredibly popular -- so much so that a film company wants to buy the rights to make an Arizona Jim movie. Unfortunately, Lange doesn't own the rights, as Batala reveals when he turns up very much alive, disguised as a priest who happened to be standing by him during the crash. When Batala begins demonstrating his old ways, including making a play for all the available women in the company as well as asserting his rights to Arizona Jim and the profits it has made, Lange shoots him, then flees with his girlfriend Valentine. Aided by Meunier, they reach an inn near the border -- which one isn't specified -- where, while Lange rests up, Valentine tells his story and leaves it up to the people at the inn whether they will turn him in. There's some famously show-offy camerawork from cinematographer Jean Bachelet, but the real energy of the film comes from Renoir's company of vivid, talkative characters, whose chatter and whose relationships unfold so rapidly that you may want to see the film twice to appreciate them. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is second-tier Renoir but, with its genuine affection for human beings, it's better than most directors' top-tier work.

Watched on Filmstruck

La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Louis XVI: Pierre Renoir
La Rochefoucauld: William Aguet
Marie Antoinette: Lise Delamare
Roederer: Louis Jouvet
Bomier: Edmond Ardisson
Arnaud: Andrex
Javel: Paul Dullac
Louison: Nadia Sibirskaïa

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, N. Martel-Dreyfus
Cinematography: Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Bourgoin, Alain Douarinou, Jean Louis, Jean-Marie Maillols
Production design: Léon Barsacq, Georges Wakhévitch
Music: Joseph Kosma, Henry Sauveplane

Just the film for Bastille Day. If ever a movie deserved the oxymoronic label of "intimate epic," it would have to be Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise, a story of the French Revolution from the fall of the Bastille to the victory over the Prussians at Valmy. It's not the part of the revolution we're used to seeing, as it ends before the Reign of Terror, with its tumbrils and guillotines. Instead, it's a collection of vignettes high and low, from the king and queen blithely expecting the trouble to blow over to the foot soldiers who marched from Marseille to Paris to depose them. The director's brother, Pierre, is a wonderful Louis XVI, not quite the caricature that Robert Morley made him in Hollywood's Marie Antoinette (W.S. Van Dyke), which was made the same year, but nevertheless more than a little out of touch: As the Tuileries is being stormed, Pierre Renoir's Louis is perturbed that he can't finish his dinner and that his wig is slightly askew. Lise Delamare's Marie Antoinette is somewhat more clued in, but her frosty hauteur suggests that she is fully capable of uttering the apocryphal "Let them eat cake." Much of the film, however, focuses on the soldiers who, after capturing the forts at Marseille, march toward Paris, and especially on Bomier, a mason who joins the regiment after putting things in order for his mother (whose tears are a familiar cinematic clue to Bomier's fate). Bomier tells his companions Arnaud and Javel that the marching song that gives the film its title is no good and will soon be forgotten, but by the time they reach Paris, he is joining in the chorus. Renoir made La Marseillaise between two greater films, Grand Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938), partly as a leftist political statement at a time when the forces of the right were triumphing on every side of France. He got his financial backing for the project from trade unions, but the film was a disaster at the box office and disappeared for a long time. It feels a little more formulaic in its characterization than Renoir's best films are and, given our knowledge of what's to come, the ending could never be quite as upbeat as Renoir seems to want it to be, but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)

Charles Blavette and Celia Montalván in Toni

Antonio "Toni"  Canova: Charles Blavette
Josefa: Celia Montalván
Fernand: Édouard Delmont
Albert: Max Dalban
Marie: Jenny Hélia
Sebastian: Michael Kovachevitch
Andrex: Gabi

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Jacques Levert
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Leon Bourrely
Film editing: Suzanne de Troeye, Marguerite Renoir
Music: Paul Bozzi

Authenticity in movies is like sincerity in politics: If you can fake it, you've got it made. Jean Renoir's Toni is a venture into realism, the quest for the kind of authenticity produced by using non-professional actors and shooting on location without resort to studio-built sets. Like the films of the Italian neorealist directors who admired and imitated Toni, it focuses on the struggles of the working class, in this case the immigrant workers from Spain, Italy, and North Africa who come to the South of France seeking jobs on the farms and, in the case of the Italian Antonio "Toni" Canova, the quarries. The film begins with Toni's arrival on a train; as the workers spread out on their search, we follow Toni as he knocks on the door of a boarding house run by Marie. Then there's an abrupt cut in which time has passed and we see that Toni is now sharing Marie's bed. It's a time jump that Renoir will use several times over the course of the film. While still with Marie, Toni falls in love with Josefa, a Spanish woman, but she agrees to marry the brutish Albert, who is Toni's boss at the quarry. Toni proposes that he and Marie join them in a double wedding ceremony. After another time jump, Josefa has had a baby and named Toni as the godfather, a role that doesn't please Marie at all. As the marriage of Toni and Marie disintegrates, he moves out of the house and she attempts suicide. Eventually, the relationship of Toni and Josefa ends in calamity, and as the film ends we have a reprise of the opening scene: Another train arrives, with yet another group of laborers. Toni is, as we should expect from Renoir, a work of great cinematic sophistication used to create a sense of simple immediacy, of witnessing real lives unfold. The story, while often melodramatic, maintains its documentary quality by relying on ambient sound and the deglamorization of its players. The polyglot cast is utterly convincing, and for once the viewer reliant on subtitles may be at something of an advantage over those just listening to the dialogue: Even if you know only a little French you can tell that the accents are thick and varied. But the film is also often visually quite beautiful: It was the first collaboration of Renoir with his nephew, Claude, as cinematographer, who achieves some quite striking nighttime scenes without resorting to the filtered or underexposed daylight shooting known as "day for night" or, in France, la nuit américaine.

The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, 1947)

Imagine The Woman on the Beach if Jean Renoir had made it in France with, say, Simone Signoret, Gérard Philipe, and Jean Gabin, and perhaps you can see what I mean when I say it's the best example of the kind of pressures Renoir felt during his war-imposed exile in Hollywood. Although the war was over, Renoir was under contract to RKO for two more pictures, but after the failure of The Woman on the Beach, the studio canceled the contract, so it was his last American film. If he had made the film in France, he wouldn't have been subjected to the heavy-handedness of Production Code censorship, which almost killed the film from the outset when the Code administrator, Joseph I. Breen,* declared the story, adapted from a novel by Mitchell Wilson, "unacceptable ... in that it is a story of adultery without any compensating moral values." Somehow Breen was persuaded to give in. But Renoir also had to put up with the studio star system, which required performers to look glamorous and handsome even in the most adverse situations. Even though Joan Bennett's character, Peggy Butler, spends a lot of time on the beach doing things like gathering firewood, her hair and makeup are always perfect. After an unfavorable preview of the film, the studio forced reshoots and made some drastic cuts -- the existing version is only 71 minutes long -- that displeased Renoir. What we have now is a sometimes fascinating, sometimes incoherent film. There's an on-again, off-again relationship between a Coast Guard officer, Scott Burnett, played by Robert Ryan, and a young woman named Eve, played by the starlet Nan Leslie, that serves no essential function in the story. Scott's nightmares about being on a sinking ship during wartime and an encounter on the beach with a ghostly woman who looks something like Eve loom large in the early part of the film but then mysteriously vanish along with any other symptoms of the PTSD Scott supposedly suffers from. The focus of the story is on Scott's affair with Peggy -- they apparently have sex in a shipwreck that has washed up on the beach -- and his suspicions about Peggy's husband, Tod (Charles Bickford), a famous painter who is now blind, the result of a fight in which Peggy threw something that severed his optic nerve. But Scott thinks Tod is faking his blindness and puts him to the test, which Tod passes by falling off a cliff without doing himself serious harm. There's a good deal of overheated dialogue: "Peg, you're so beautiful ... so beautiful outside, so rotten inside." In the end, there's a conclusion in which nothing is concluded: Scott seemingly tries but fails to drown both himself and Tod; Tod sets fire to the cabin that contains his cherished surviving paintings; he and Peggy set off for New York; and Scott retires from his commission in the Coast Guard. Some of this might have made emotional sense in a better-crafted film, one not subject to the tinkering and scrubbing that the studio and the censors enforced. Still, Bennett, Ryan, and Bickford perform with conviction, and there are those who find even the film's chaotic presentation of erotic entanglements compelling.

*Renoir doesn't seem to have nursed any hard feelings against Breen: He cast his son, Thomas E. Breen, in a key role in The River (1951).

La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Seeing Michel Simon as the milquetoast Maurice Legrand in La Chienne after L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) and Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932) is something of a revelation, even if at the end of La Chienne he has become something like Boudu. But the entire film is a revelation: The second sound film by Renoir, it demonstrates an innovative mastery of what was essentially a new medium, one that even the Americans who claimed to have invented synchronized sound were still struggling with. Renoir -- with the help of sound technicians Denise Batcheff and Marcel Courmes -- creates an auditory ambience still rare in 1931, relying on dialogue and sound effects created on set and not in post-production. The most often-cited example is the rasp of the paper knife held by Lulu (Janie Marèse) as she cuts the pages of the book she's trying to read -- just before Legrand kills her with it. But the film is full of small auditory details like the squeaking of the shoes worn by the defense attorney (Sylvain Itkine) as he paces nervously back and forth before his doomed client, Dédé (Georges Flamant). But beyond the technical mastery, which also includes some brilliant camerawork by cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl, the film is a tour de force of bitter irony, not least because Renoir keeps it from falling into sensationalism or unrelieved darkness. Legrand, initially the henpecked husband to a termagant (Magdeleine Bérubet), brings calamity to several lives, not only those of Lulu and Dédé, but also those of his wife and her supposedly dead ex-husband (Roger Gaillard). And yet, at the film's end he survives, not only unbroken but in many ways a stronger man than he was at the film's beginning. His story is framed as a puppet show with, as a puppet claims, "no moral message." But though Legrand commits fraud, adultery, and murder without receiving the official punishment of the law, the moral is aimed at those who scorned and abused him: Beware the worm who may turn and prove to be a viper.

Two by Jean Renoir

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)

Michel Simon in Boudu Saved From Drowning

Priape Boudu: Michel Simon
Édouard Lestingois: Charles Granval
Emma Lestingois: Marcelle Hainia
Chloë Anne Marie: Sévérine Lerczinska
Vigour: Jean Gehret
Godin: Max Dalban
A Student: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin
Based on a play by René Fauchois
Cinematography: Georges Asselin

A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Sylvia Bataille and Georges D'Arnoux in A Day in the Country

Henriette: Sylvia Bataille
Henri: Georges D'Arnoux
Madame Dufour: Jane Marken
Monsieur Dufour: André Gabriello
Rodolphe: Jacques B. Brunius
Anatole: Paul Temps
Grandmother: Gabrielle Fontan
Uncle Poulain: Jean Renoir
Waitress: Marguerite Renoir

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Music: Joseph Kosma

"Épater la bourgeoisie!" went the rallying cry of France's 19th-century poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who styled themselves as "Decadents." But ever since Molière's M. Jourdain, the social-climbing bourgeois gentilhomme, was delighted to discover that he was speaking prose, French artists of whatever medium have delighted themselves in satirizing the manners and morals of the middle class, sometimes affectionately and sometimes savagely. On my living room wall I have two prints of cartoons done by Honoré Daumier in a series he called "Pastorales." Both show very solidly middle-class and middle-aged couples, presumably Parisians taking a day in the country. In one, the husband carries his large, copiously clad wife on his back as he fords a small stream that barely comes to his ankles. They have evidently been caught in a summer storm, for he is chiding her that such things are to be expected, even on the sunniest day. Meanwhile, she is urging him, "Ah, Jules, don't let the torrent sweep us away!" In the other, a similarly clad woman sits on the bank of a pond in which her husband, wearing his glasses and with his head wrapped in a handkerchief, has been taking a dip. "The water is delicious, Virginie," he says. "I assure you, you're making a mistake by not joining me." I was reminded of these prints while watching Jean Renoir's great short film -- it's only 40 minutes long, but every minute is golden -- A Day in the Country. In it, the Dufour family -- husband, wife, daughter, future son-in-law, and comically deaf grandmother -- find a country inn in a beautiful setting on their day away from the city. The mother and daughter immediately become targets for two young men, who manage to set off with them in their skiffs on the river, after diverting the other men by lending them fishing poles. The daughter, Henriette, goes with Henri. When a storm comes up, they take shelter in the woods, where she yields to his advances. Years later, she returns to the same spot with her husband, Anatole, an unromantic drip, and while he naps, she encounters Henri and recalls their brief encounter. The film is an exquisite mix of comedy and melancholy, the kind of subtle blending of tones Renoir is known for from his greatest films, The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). A Day in the Country was in fact never finished -- weather interrupted the shooting and Renoir had to move on to another commitment -- but the existing footage was assembled ten years later under the supervision of the producer, Pierre Braunberger, with two explanatory intertitles, and it stands on its own as a masterwork. In sharp contrast to the affectionately amused treatment of the bourgeoisie in A Day in the Country, Boudu Saved From Drowning is a raucous free-for-all centered on the great eccentric Michel Simon in the title role. Boudu is a tramp, a shaggy monster, who after his dog runs away decides to drown himself in the Seine. But he is rescued by Édouard Lestingois, a bookseller, who takes him into his home. Boudu proceeds to trash the place and seduce both Mme. Lestingois and the housemaid, who is also Lestingois' mistress. Simon's performance pulls out all the stops in one of the greatest comic tours de force in film history. If you want to see what épater la bourgeoisie really means, just watch Boudu.   

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The first time I saw The Rules of the Game, many years ago, I didn't get it. I knew it was often spoken of as one of the great films, but I couldn't see why. I had been raised on Hollywood movies, which fell neatly into their assigned slots: love story, adventure, screwball comedy, satire, social commentary, and so on. Jean Renoir's film seemed to be all of those things, and none of them satisfactorily. I had to be weaned from narrative formulas to realize why this sometimes madcap, sometimes brutal tragicomedy is regarded so highly. And I had to learn why the period it depicts, the brink of World War II, isn't just a point in the rapidly receding past, but the emblematic representation of a precipice that the human world always seems poised upon, whether the chief threat to civilization is Nazism or global climate change. The Rules of the Game is about us, dancing merrily on the brink, trying to ignore our mutual cruelty and to deny our blindness. Renoir's characters are blinded by lust and privilege, and they amuse us until they do horrible things like wantonly slaughter small animals or play foolish games whose rules they take too lightly. I'm afraid that makes one of the most entertaining (if disturbing) films ever made seem like no fun at all, but it should really be taken as a warning never to ignore the subtext of any work of art. Much of the film was improvised from a story Renoir provided, to the glory of such performers as Marcel Dalio as the marquis, Nora Gregor as his wife, Paulette Dubost as Lisette, Roland Toutain as André, Gaston Modot as Schumacher, Julien Carette as Marceau, and especially Renoir himself as Octave. Renoir's camera prowls relentlessly, restlessly through the giddy action and the sumptuousness of the sets by Max Douy and Eugène Lourié. It's not surprising that one of Renoir's assistants was the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. And, given my own initial reaction to the film, it's also not surprising that The Rules of the Game was a critical and commercial flop, trimmed to a nubbin of its original length, banned by the Vichy government, and after its negative was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942, potentially lost forever. Fortunately, prints survived, and by 1959 Renoir's admirers had reassembled it for a more appreciative posterity.

The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

The Southerner is perhaps the best of the films Renoir made during his wartime exile in the United States, which is not to say that it ranks with his French masterpieces that include Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), or Rules of the Game (1939). It does, however, stand up well against the better American films of 1945, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock), or Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl). It also earned him his only Oscar nomination as director: He lost to Billy Wilder for The Lost Weekend, but he was presented an honorary Oscar in 1975. The film was also nominated for sound (Jack Whitney) and music score (Werner Janssen). The Southerner feels less authentic than it might: Renoir was unable to overcome the Hollywood desire for gloss, so Betty Field looks awfully healthy and well-coiffed for the wife of a hard-scrabble cotton farmer whose family lives in a shack with no running water and whose youngest child almost dies of "spring sickness" -- a form of pellagra caused by malnutrition. Zachary Scott is a little more credible as her determined husband, Sam Tucker, a cotton picker who decides to start farming on his own. The role is a sharp contrast to his performance the same year in Mildred Pierce, in which he's a slick con man -- the kind of role he found himself playing more often. The cast also includes Beulah Bondi as Sam Tucker's grandmother, J. Carrol Naish as the Tuckers' stingy neighbor, and Norman Lloyd as the neighbor's nephew and man-of-all-work, who tries to drive the Tuckers off their land. Renoir is credited with the screenplay along with Hugo Butler, who did the adaptation of a novel by George Sessions Perry, but it was also worked on by an uncredited William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson.

Swamp Water (Jean Renoir, 1941)

Swamp Water has a few things working against it other than its title. For one, having a cast of familiar Hollywood stars pretending to be farmers, hunters, and trappers living on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp, and saying things like "I brung her" and "He got losted," makes for a certain lack of authenticity. And at 32, its leading man, Dana Andrews is about a decade too old to be playing the callow youth he's supposed to be in the movie. Add to that the director, Jean Renoir, is a wartime exile from France, making his first film in Hollywood, and you might expect the worst. Fortunately, it has a screenplay by a master, Dudley Nichols, and an eminently watchable cast that includes Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette, who while they may never quite convince us that they're Georgia swamp-folk, do their professional best. It turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining movie that, while it doesn't add any luster to Renoir's career, doesn't detract from it either. This was Andrews's second year in movies, and he gives the kind of energetic performance that mostly overcomes miscasting. Born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, he also seems to know the character he's called on to play, perhaps a little better than the city-bred Baxter, whose efforts at being the village outcast are a bit forced. Brennan as usual plays an old coot, but without overdoing the mannerisms -- it's a slyly engaging performance. Much of the footage was shot by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and the uncredited Lucien Ballard in the actual swamp and environs near Waycross, Georgia. There is some obvious failure to match the location footage with that shot back in the 20th Century-Fox studio, but it's not terribly distracting.

The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)

The near-hallucinatory vividness of Technicolor was seemingly made for Jean Renoir, the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but this film was his first use of the process. It's the more remarkable because he was working with his nephew (and Pierre-Auguste's grandson), Claude Renoir, the cinematographer, and neither director nor photographer was particularly experienced in shooting landscape, especially in the country of India, which is the real star of the film. The River has a distinctly Western attitude toward the country, viewing it through the eyes of its British residents. It's based on the experiences of Rumer Godden, the English writer who spent her childhood in India. Her screenplay, co-written with Jean Renoir, is about the tensions between cultures, using the Ganges, the titular river, as a symbol of both the eternal and the mutable. Ravishingly beautiful as the film is, it suffers from some major weaknesses in casting. Its central character, the teenager Harriet, is played by Patricia Walters, a nonprofessional who made no subsequent films and never quite seems at ease before the camera. As Capt. John, the American recovering from the loss of a leg during the war, Thomas E. Breen doesn't have the kind of charisma that would seem to have Harriet, her older friend Valerie (Adrienne Corri), and her Eurasian neighbor (Radha Burnier) falling over themselves to attract his attention. (Breen, incidentally, was both a real amputee from a war wound and the son of the enforcer of the Production Code, Joseph I. Breen.) But for those willing to overlook its flaws, which also include a lack of narrative urgency, The River rewards sympathetic attention and, as a film by a Frenchman about the English in India, stands as a landmark in postwar international filmmaking.

Elena et les hommes (Jean Renoir, 1956)

Like French Cancan (1954) and The Golden Coach (1952), this is one of Renoir's brightly Technicolored entertainments, with ravishing cinematography by his nephew, Claude Renoir, that recalls the rich colors of the paintings by Jean's father and Claude's grandfather, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. And like many of those paintings, the movie opens itself up to criticisms of possessing more style than substance. Elena et les hommes, which was originally released in the United States under the title Paris Does Strange Things, is a giddy, somewhat brainless romp whose chief claim to our attention is that it was the first film Ingrid Bergman made after her break from Roberto Rossellini. I watched it just after having seen three of those films -- Stromboli (1950), Voyage to Italy (1954), and Fear (1954) -- in which Bergman is put to extremes of emotional torment. Making Elena must have been an enormous relief for her, because it shows: She has never been more beautiful onscreen, wearing the opulent finery of 1880s Paris. She has also never been more lively or funny, throwing herself with complete abandon into the nonsense of the plot. It makes me regret that she did so few comedies: Only Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958) and Cactus Flower (Gene Saks, 1969) gave her a real chance to lighten up the way Renoir's film does, although she showed her comic skills by parodying her more glum roles, especially the doughty missionary in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958), in her Oscar-winning performance in Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974). It's too bad that her leading men in Elena aren't up to her standards: Jean Marais looks like he doesn't understand what's going on (which is understandable when so much is), while Mel Ferrer looks like he gets it but can't quite overcome the handicap of being Mel Ferrer when what is needed is a Cary Grant or a James Stewart to match Bergman's skills.