Renoir's Best: A List
September 4, 2005
In his long and lauded career, Jean Renoir made a list of great films average director’s could only dream of, ranging from the social realism and poetic realist drama’s of the ‘30’s, his best period, to the wildly colorful entertainment musicals of the mid ‘50’s, his comeback period. It’s hard to argue why one of his masterpieces is better than the next, but for the sake of it, here now are my thoughts on my favorite ten Renoir films.
10. The Southerner (’45): Due to increasing fear of the Nazi’s, and the fact that his recent films had been widely criticized by the French, Renoir left France for America and signed a contract with 20th Century Fox in 1941. Of the five films he made for Fox, this depression-era allegory about a poor southern family trying desperately to grow cotton, amidst disease, flood, and a bitterly jealous neighbor, is easily the best, featuring Renoir’s humanist touch and championing of the downtrodden. Renoir was nominated for the Best Director Oscar, his only such nomination, and the film features un credited script work by William Faulkner and second unit direction from future master Robert Aldrich.
9. French Cancan (’55): Back in France, after diversions in America and Italy, Renoir directed his last great film, a gaudy, entertaining backstage musical comedy about a famous theater producer, and notorious womanizer, who molds a poor laundry girl into a world class Cancan dancer during the heyday of the Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin, the Clark Gable of French cinema, stars as Henri Danglard in one of his most playful performances, and Francoise Arnoul is charming as the naïve dancer, but this grand entertainment is all about the music, settings, colors, and dance, and if it’s possible, even upstages John Huston’s own 1952 “Moulin Rouge” for shear spectacle.
8. Boudu Saved From Drowning (’32): France’s comedic godfather, Michel Simon, gives an amazingly raunchy and frisky performance as a hobo turning a bourgeois household upside down in this famous comedy from France’s premier socialist director. Remade twice, with Nick Nolte and Gerard Depardieu in the Boudu role, but nobody is ever going to top Simon’s heroic, and hilariously unkempt performance; it’s a thing of grungy beauty.
7. The Golden Coach (’53): Filmed at Rome’s famous Cinecitta studio, this vehicle for Italy’s grand first lady of film, Anna Magnani, a studio bound comedy about three men wooing a beautiful comedienne, is generally regarded as the best of Renoir’s mid-‘50’s color trilogy, followed by “French Cancan” and “Elena and Her Men”. Photographed with incredible attention to color by Renoir’s nephew Claude, and featuring a soundtrack soaked in Vivaldi, this stagy Commedia dell’Arte is best compared with the period sagas of Max Ophuls than with Renoir’s earlier ‘30’s work, but anybody who has seen Ophuls’ “The Earrings of Madame D.” or “Lola Montes” knows the comparison is a major compliment.
6. La Chienne (’31): Renoir’s first sound film is usually considered his first true masterpiece, a brutal attack on the bourgeois featuring Michel Simon as a henpecked husband married to a nightmare he decides to get rid off when he starts sleeping with a street walker, who in turn is only using him for money, she being so infatuated with her dangerous pimp. The plot alone tells you all you need to know about this gritty, expressionistic fireball of anger and irony.
5. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (’36): One of Renoir’s best films of the ‘30’s, still missing on DVD, though I’m sure Criterion has plans to bring it out in the near future, about a petty worker who kills his tyrannical boss after finding out he was harassing the woman of his laundry shop. This atmospheric socialist drama, written by Renoir and Jacques Prevert, features one of Renoir’s best set pieces, a laundry shop set two stories above an open courtyard, which allows Renoir’s constantly moving camera to cascade down the spiraling staircase and out the shop’s windows into the courtyard at a dizzying pace. The plot is somewhat labored and slow, but Renoir’s cinematic mastery is on full display here.
4. A Day in the Country (’36): Not an easy film to find (I believe it was released on video as part of a double feature with “La Chienne” years back, and is still unavailable on DVD), but for those who have seen it, be it on that rare tape, or in film school, never forget the beauty of this 40 minute walk in the park. There is really no plot, something about a woman falling in love on a family picnic, but the film exists primarily as the moment in time when the son Renoir fully escaped father Renoir’s legendary shadow, most ironically, by painting a picture of impressionistic beauty worthy of any of Auguste’s 19th century canvases. To best understand the kind of talent involved with this little masterwork, you need go further than to know that it’s talented assistant directors included future famous names like Jacques Becker and Luchino Visconti. Idyllic country photography is rarely this gorgeous.
3. The River (’51): As a student studying filmmaking, Indian master Satyjit Ray (The ‘Apu’ Trilogy) would walk down to the banks of the Ganges where he’d watch Renoir shooting this Technicolor adaptation of Rumer Godden’s girl-centric novel about an English family living in Bengal, and their teenage girl who comes of age during one particularly sunny summer of love. Claude Renoir’s cinematography is a study in reds and yellows and Subrata Mitra’s sitar playing lends the film a mystical Eastern flavor most foreign productions taking place in India hardly ever seem to get right. This was Renoir’s first film after his unsuccessful stay in America ended in ’47, it was a major hit, and is arguably the director’s most cherished color film; it’s certainly his best.
2. The Rules of the Game (’39): So much has been written about this one of a kind masterpiece that it’s hard to bring any kind of new perspective to the table, so let’s just say that all of the talk about this being France’s equivalent to “Citizen Kane” is probably correct, if slightly overblown. Taking place in a huge countryside mansion, a rich woman throws a party for her former lover, a pilot and national hero, setting in motion a vast jigsaw puzzle of affairs involving the guests, the help, and the hosts. The play between the classes is classic Renoir, who also has a crucial role as the mediator between the hosts and the pilot, and the rabbit hunt sequence is about as symbolic as the director ever got, but this film was booed mercilessly when it was first released, and when the Nazi’s came into power, it was lost for years, finally resurfacing to much acclaim decades later. The framing, camera movement, and deep focus photography is the stuff of legend, and every film history class ever taught.
1. Grand Illusion (’37): It’s safe to say that most critics would rate “The Rules of the Game” a bit higher than this famous anti-war picture, but not me, it was my first introduction into the cinema of Renoir, and is still my favorite, one of those rare pictures that is simply perfect from start to finish, and one of the ten best films of all time. Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay star as two French Prisoners of War, one a commoner, the other an aristocrat, trying to tunnel out of a German camp during WWI. When they do, they are caught and taken to the country border mansion of Erich Von Stroheim, a German officer and aristocrat who respects Fresnay’s politics, and laments the “doomed nobility” of modern warfare. After this film won a major prize at the Venice film festival in ’37, the Nazi’s quickly denounced it, and it was lost, like ‘Rules’ for many years, but it’s spotted history is solidly in tact today, as it is usually, and rightfully, regarded as the greatest pacifist anti-war film ever made, trumping Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” by a few votes. Austrian born Von Stroheim, a master director in his own right, gives the performance of a lifetime as the genteel German officer, and Gabin cements his iconic status as the peasant hero, playing off of Fresnay’s aristocratic ideals. The final scene, the death of an ancient way of life, symbolized by one glorious close-up of a perfectly healthy rose, is Renoir’s most beautiful filmed climax, and the pinnacle of a truly blessed cannon of films from France’s hailed cinematic genius.
by Adam Suraf