September 7, 2010 (XXI:2) Jean Renoir, BOUDU SAVED from DROWNING/BOUDU SAUVÉ DES EAUX (1932, 85 Min)

September 7, 2010 (XXI:2) Jean Renoir, BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING/BOUDU SAUVÉ DES EAUX (1932, 85 min)

Directed by Jean Renoir Based on a play by René Fauchois Screenplay by Jean Renoir and Albert Valentin Produced by Michel Simon Cinematography by Georges Asselin Film Editing by Suzanne de Troeye and Marguerite Renoir Assistant director…Jacques Becker

Michel Simon...Priape Boudu Marcelle Hainia...Emma Lestingois Sévérine Lerczinska...Chloë Anne Marie, la bonne Jean Gehret...Vigour Max Dalban...Godin Jean Dasté...L'étudiant Charles Granval...Édouard Lestingois Geneviève Cadix Jacques Becker...Le poète Monsieur Lange 1936, Une partie de campaign 1936, Madame Bovary 1933, La Chienne 1931 (The Bitch, Isn’t Life a Bitch?), Le JEAN RENOIR (15 Bled 1929, Nana 1926, and Une vie sans joie 1924 (Backbiters, September 1894, Paris–12 Catherine). He occasionally stepped in front of the camera. Some of February 1979, Beverly his roles were: Octave in La Règle du jeu, Cabuche in La Bête Hills) directed about 40 humaine, and Père Poulain in Une partie de campagne. In 1975, films and wrote or co- Renoir received an honorary Academy Award as “A genius who, wrote the scripts for the with grace, responsibility and enviable devotion through silent best of them. He funded film, sound film, feature, documentary and television has won the his earliest films— world's admiration.” La Grande Illusion won a special award as undertaken as a showcase Best Overall Artistic Contribution from the Venice Film Festival in for his actress wife—by 1937; the following year, the film was banned in Italy, and selling some of his remained so until 1945. There’s a great web site on Renoir, in father’s paintings. He French, “Je m’appelle Jean Renoir,” at www.univ-nancy2.fr/renoir/. moved to the United States when the Nazis ALBERT VALENTIN (5 August 1902, La Louvière, Hainaut, occupied France. Some of Belgium—13 April 1968, Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, France), wrote his films are Le Déjeuner 35 films: Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme 1968, Le sur l'herbe1959, Éléna et canard en fer-blanc 1967, Messalina vs. the Son of les hommes 1956 (Paris Hercules/L'ultimo gladiatore/Messalina Against the Son of Does Strange Things), Hercules 1964, Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta/The Terror of Rome French Cancan 1955, Le Against the Son of Hercules 1964, Good King Dagobert/Le bon roi Carrosse d'or 1952, The Dagobert 1963, Goliath and the Rebel Slave/Goliath e la schiava River 1951, The Woman on the Beach 1947, The Diary of a ribelle/Gordian the Glorious Avenger/The Tyrant of Lydia Against Chambermaid 1946, The Southerner 1945, This Land Is Mine 1943, the Son of Hercules 1963, L'eroe di Babilonia/The Beast of Babylon Swamp Water 1941, La Règle du jeu 1939 (The Rules of the Game), Against the Son of Hercules 1963, Destination Rome/Tempo di La Bête Humaine 1938 (The Human Beast, Judas Was a Woman), Roma 1963, Il cambio della guardia 1962, The Vendetta/La La Marseillaise 1938, La Grande Illusion (1937), Le Crime de vendetta 1962, Emile's Boat/Le bateau d'Émile 1962, Why Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—2

Paris?/Pourquoi Paris? 1962, Meurtre en 45 tours 1960, Too Late Paris 1953, La vie d'un honnête homme 1953, Le marchand de to Love/Pourquoi viens-tu si tard?/Why Do You Come So Late? Venise/The Merchant of Venice 1953, Monsieur Taxi 1952, 1959, Archimède, le clochard 1959, The Female/La femme et le Poison/La poison 1951, Beauty and the Devil/La beauté du diable pantin 1959, Maxime 1958, Nana 1955, The Affairs of 1950, Les amants du pont Saint-Jean 1947, Non coupable 1947, Messalina/Messalina 1951, Sérénade au bourreau 1951) writer, Panic/Panique 1947, A Friend Will Come Tonight/...Un ami The Strange Madame X/L'étrange Mme X 1951, Au p'tit zouave viendra ce soir... 1946, Girl of the Golden West/Una signora 1950, L'échafaud peut attendre 1949, La vie de plaisir 1944, The dell'ovest 1942, The Story of Tosca/ Tosca 1941, Love Woman Who Dared/Le ciel est à vous/The Sky Is Yours 1944, Sins Cavalcade/Cavalcade d'amour 1940, Derrière la façade 1939, La of Youth/Péchés de jeunesse 1941, L'étrange Monsieur fin du jour/The End of the Day 1939, Belle étoile 1938, The Victor/Strange M. Victor 1938, The Great Temptation/La porte du Stream/Le ruisseau 1938, Les nouveaux riches 1938, Port of large 1936, Toi que j'adore 1934, Boudu Saved from Shadows/Le quai des brumes 1938, Le règne de l'esprit malin 1938, Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932. Bizarre, Bizarre/Drôle de drame ou L'étrange aventure du Docteur Molyneux/Funny Drama or The Strange Adventures of Doctor GEORGES ASSELIN was cinematographer for 36 films, among them Molyneaux 1937, Mirages 1937, Let Us Do a Dream/Faisons un Une idée à l'eau 1940), Son oncle de Normandie 1939, Courrier rêve... 1936, Jeunes filles de Paris 1936, Sous les yeux d'occident d'Asie 1939, Les chevaliers de la cloche/Precious Fools 1937, 1936, Le bébé de l'escadron 1935, Amants et voleurs/Lovers and Passeurs d'hommes/Human Freight 1937, Second Thieves 1935, Le bonheur 1934/I, L'atalante 1934, Léopold le bien- Bureau/Deuxième bureau 1936, The Drunkard/ La pocharde 1936, aimé 1934, Adémaï au moyen âge 1934, High and Low/Du haut en Les deux gamines 1936, Le champion de ces dames 1935, Children bas/From Top to Bottom 1933, Boudu Saved from Drowning/Boudu of Montmartre/La maternelle 1933, Miss Helyett 1933, Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932, The Bitch/La chienne/Isn't Life a Bitch? 1931, Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932, Prisonnier de On purge bébé 1931, Jean de la Lune 1931, Illegitimate mon coeur 1932, Night at the Crossroads/La nuit du carrefour Child/L'enfant de l'amour 1930, Pivoine 1929, The Sad Sack/Tire 1932, Une idée folle 1932, Mon gosse de père 1930, La nuit est à au flanc 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc/La passion de Jeanne nous 1930, Dans la nuit 1929, L'appel de la chair 1929, Hara-Kiri d'Arc 1928, The Loves of Casanova/Casanova/Prince of 1928, Chantage 1927, Malvaloca 1926, Jack 1925, Les opprimés Adventurers/Casanova, the Prince of Adventure 1927, L'inconnue 1923, The Battle/La bataille 1923, L'amie d'enfance 1922, and des six jours 1926, The Vocation of André Carel/La vocation Malencontre 1920. d'André Carel 1925, and La galerie des monsters/Gallery of Monsters 1924. JACQUES BECKER (15 September 1906, Paris, France—21 February 1960, Paris, France) was second unit director or assistant director on 11 films, several of them Renoir’s: La Marseillaise 1938, The Grand Illusion/La grande illusion 1937, Les bas- fonds/The Lower Depths 1936, La vie est à nous/Life Is Ours 1936, Partie de campagne/Picnic 1936/I, Madame Bovary 1933, Boudu Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932, and Night at the Crossroads/La nuit du carrefour 1932. He is a well known director in his own right. Some of his 17 films are The Night Watch/Le trou 1960, The Adventures of Arsène Lupin/Les aventures d'Arsène Lupin 1957, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves/Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs/Dance of Desire 1954, Touchez pas au grisbi/Grisbi/Hands Off the Loot 1954, Rue de l'Estrapade 1953, Golden Marie/Casque d'or 1952, Edward and Caroline/Édouard et Caroline 1951, Rendezvous in July/Rendez-vous de juillet 1949, Antoine et Antoinette 1947, Dernier atout 1942, Cristobal's Gold/L'or du Cristobal 1940, La vie est à nous/Life Is Ours 1936, Le commissaire est bon enfant, le gendarme est sans pitié 1935, and Tête de turc 1935, MARCELLE HAINIA (13 November 1896, Paris, France—9 August MICHEL SIMON (9 April 1895, Geneva, Switzerland—30 May 1968, Paris, France) appeared in 21 films and TV dramas, among 1975, Bry-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, France) appeared in 110 them Allô police 1969, Les collégiennes 1957, School for films, among them The Red Ibis/L'Ibis rouge 1975, The Butcher, the Love/Futures vedettes/Joy of Loving 1955, Rififi/Du rififi chez les Star and the Orphan/Le boucher, la star et l'orpheline/The Star, the hommes 1955, La demoiselle et son revenant 1952, Love, Orphan, and the Butcher 1975, La più bella serata della mia vita Madame/L'amour, Madame 1952, Mademoiselle Josette ma femme 1972, Blanche 1971, The House/La maison 1970, Two Hours to 1951, Justice Is Done/Justice est faite 1950, Torrents 1947, The Kill/Deux heures à tuer 1966, Ecce Homo 1965, Cyrano et Room Upstairs/Martin Roumagnac 1946, Gringalet 1946, Father d'Artagnan 1964, The Train/John Frankenheimer's The Train 1964, Serge/Le père Serge 1945, Service de nuit 1944, It Happened at the The Devil and the Ten Commandments/Le diable et les dix Inn/Goupi mains rouges 1943) The Little Thing/Le petit chose 1938, commandements 1962, Candide/Candide ou l'optimisme au XXe and Boudu Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux. siècle 1960, The Battle of Austerlitz/Austerlitz 1960, It Happened in Broad Daylight/Es geschah am hellichten Tag 1958, La joyeuse SEVERINE LERCZINSKA appeared in only two films, both by prison 1956, Memories of a Cop/Mémoires d'un flic 1956, Renoir: La Marseillaise 1938, Boudu Saved from Drowning/Boudu Hungarian Rhapsody/Ungarische Rhapsodie 1954, Femmes de sauvé des eaux 1932. Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—3

I would have like to join them and be impressive myself. JEAN GEHRET (10 January 1900, Geneva, Switzerland—25 May Unfortunately nature had made me a coward. As soon as I detected 1956, Paris, France) appeared in nine films, most with Renoir: a crack in the protective wall, I yelled with terror.” Adieu Léonard 1943, Crime and Punishment/Crime et châtiment By the time his second son was born, Auguste Renoir was 1935/I, Madame Bovary 1933, Cent mille francs pour un baiser fifty-three, and his paintings, scornfully rejected twenty years 1933, Boudu Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932, earlier, were becoming accepted and salable. Jean Renoir (who Night at the Crossroads/La nuit du carrefour 1932, Baleydier 1932, often served as his father’s model) was brought up in comfortable, Moune et son notaire 1932, The Bitch/La chienne/ Isn't Life a though never luxurious, surroundings, which he recalled as full of Bitch? 1931. laughter, light, friendship and vivid physical sensation, “a simple environment in which nothing trashy was tolerated.” His first MAX DALBAN (27 May 1908—9 February 1958) appeared in 64 experience of the cinema, which took place in 1898, was films, some of which were It's Adam's Fault/C'est la faute d'Adam inauspicious (“I howled as usual and had to be taken out”), but his 1958, Crazy in the Noodle/Comme un cheveu sur la soupe/Kindly introduction to the Guignol theatre at the Tuileries, two years later, Kill Me 1957, A Friend of the Family/L'ami de la famille 1957, On sparked off a lifelong enthusiasm for the stage, as well as “a taste déménage le colonel 1955, Tant qu'il y aura des femmes 1955, for naïve stories and a deep mistrust of what is generally called Leguignon guérisseur 1954, The Slave/L'esclave 1953, Innocents in psychology.” Since his father considered all attempts to train Paris 1953, It Happened in Paris/C'est arrivé à Paris 1952, My children a waste of time, it was not until Renoir was seven that he Wife Is Formidable/Ma femme est formidable 1951, Paris was sent to school—to the Collège Saint-Croix at Neuilly, where he Nights/Nuits de Paris 1951, Véronique 1950, La valse de Paris had been preceded by his elder brother Pierre. 1950, On demande un bandit 1950, Maya 1949, On demande un Unlike his brother, Renoir was unhappy at Saint-Croix. He assassin 1949, Les amants de Vérone 1949, Scandals of ran away several times before his parents moved him to the less Clochemerle/Clochemerle 1948, Si jeunesse savait 1948, Les gosses strict Sainte-Marie de Monceau, where he greatly enjoyed the mènent l'enquête 1947, Le silence est d'or/Man About Town/Silence weekly movie show featuring a car-mad comedian named Is Golden 1947, Panic/Panique 1947, The White Blackbird/Le Automaboul. From there he moved to the École Massena in Nice, merle blanc 1944, Secrets 1943, Pour le maillot jaune 1940, and in 1913 earned his Baccalauréat in mathematics and philosophy Sirocco/La maison du Maltais 1938, The Alibi/L'alibi 1937, La vie from the University of Aix-en-Provence. He had taken to writing est à nous/Life Is Ours 1936, Street Without a Name/La rue sans poetry, and there was talk of his becoming a writer. However, “I nom 1934, Chotard and Company/Chotard et Cie 1933, Boudu began to realize that my father was an important artist, and it rather Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932, Night at the frightened me, and I tried to set my mind to everything that was Crossroads/La nuit du carrefour 1932, Moune et son notaire 1932, contrary to art….I was very fond of horses, and so I wanted to be a The Bitch/La chienne/Isn't Life a Bitch? 1931, The Tournament/Le cavalry officer.” He therefore enlisted as a sergeant in the Chasseurs tournoi dans la cité 1928, and The Sad Sack/Tire au flanc 1928. Alpins. At the outbreak of World War I he was commissioned second lieutenant and sent to the Vosges front, where “a Bavarian JEAN DASTE (18 August 1904, Paris, France—15 October 1994, sniper did me the service of putting a bullet in my thigh.” Saint-Etienne, Loire, France) appeared in 49 films and tv programs, Hospitalized with a fractured femur, he was only saved from having among them Projections 1990, Noce blanche 1989, Sorceress/Le his leg amputated by the intervention of his mother, by then gravely moine et la sorcière 1987, Une semaine de vacances/A Week's ill with diabetes. She died two months later. Vacation 1980, Mon oncle d'Amérique 1980, , Molière 1978, Renoir’s wound healed, but he was left with a permanent Utopia 1978, The Green Room/La chambre verte 1978, The Man limp. While convalescing, he developed a passion for the cinema, Who Loved Women/L'homme qui aimait les femmes 1977, The Wild often seeing twenty or more pictures a week, almost always Child/L'enfant sauvage 1970, Z 1969, The War Is Over/La guerre American pictures. On a friend’s recommendation, he sought out est finie 1966, Skies Above/Le ciel sur la tête/Sky Above Heaven Chaplin’s films. “To say that I was enthusiastic would be 1965, Muriel, or The Time of Return/Muriel ou Le temps d'un inadequate. I was carried away. The genius of Charlot had been retour 1963, St. Val's Mystery/Le mystère Saint-Val 1945, La revealed to me.” He even persuaded his father, now confined to a grande meute 1945, Adieu Léonard 1943, A Star to the Sun/Une wheelchair, to buy a projector so that they could watch Chaplin étoile au soleil 1943, The Grand Illusion/La grande illusion/Grand movies together in the studio. Illusion 1937, La vie est à nous/Life Is Ours 1936, The Crime of In 1916, returning to active duty, Renoir transferred to the Monsieur Lange/Le crime de Monsieur Lange 1936, L'atalante Flying Corps and became a pilot. After several successful missions, 1934, Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège 1933, and Boudu he crashed, thereby aggravating his leg injury, and decided that he Saved from Drowning/Boudu sauvé des eaux 1932. had seen enough combat. “French aviation lost little by this. I was not a very good pilot.” Securing the undemanding post of chief From World Film Directors, Vol. I. Edited by John Wakeman. military censor at Nice (“There was never anything to censor”), he H.W. Wilson Co., NY, 1987. Entry by Philip Kemp spent most of his time at his father’s studio, a few miles away in French director and scenarist, was born in Montmartre, second of Cagnes. Though immobilized, August Renoir was still actively the three sons of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the impressionist painter, painting; his most frequent model was a young Alsatian woman, and his wife Aline, née Charigot….Renoir grew up in three Andrée Heuschling, with whom Jean fell in love. They were environments: in Paris, in his mother’s Burgundian village of married in January 1920, a few weeks after Auguste Renoir’s death. Essoyes, and in Provence, where the family often spent winters. Their son Alain, Renoir’s only child, was born in 1921. Much of his upbringing was entrusted to his adored Gabrielle, Aline For four years Renoir worked at pottery and ceramics, in Renoir’s young cousin, who lived with the family. “I was a spoiled company with his wife, his younger brother Claude, and various child. Family life surrounded me with a protective wall, softly friends, but his interests were turning towards filmmaking. Two padded on the inside. Outside, impressive personages bustled about. pictures in particular decided him: Voilkov’s Le Brasier ardent Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—4 with Mosjoukine; and Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, which he saw ten good deal of professional hostility, being seen as a rich amateur times, stirred by the cinematic possibilities it revealed. “I started out trying to buy his way into the industry. He had, it was true, invested in the cinema because I was interested in trick shots…purely in a million francs of his own money, raised by selling pictures left technique and trick shots,” he later recalled, although elsewhere he him by his father; and when Nana, despite some very favorable stated that “I only ventured into cinema in the hope of making my reviews, proved a financial disaster, he had to sell a lot more to wife a star….I did not foresee that, once caught up in the meet the bills. Realizing that, for a while at least, he would have to machinery, I would never be able to escape.” Whatever the reason, make commercial potboilers if he wanted to work in cinema at all, in March 1924 he began work on Catherine, otherwise known as Renoir “deserted the ranks of the avant-garde for those of industry.” Une Vie sans joie, with Andrée starring under the name of …The best of Renoir’s commercial chores of the period Catherine Hessling. The director was the actor Albert Dieudonné was his contribution to the popular genre of comique troupier (who played Napoleon in Gance’s grandiose epic), though some (military farce), Tire au flanc (1928). A boisterously episodic surviving prints credit Renoir with codirection. He certainly account of a young man’s induction into the army, “it does for produced and scripted, besides taking a small role as a lecherous barracks life,” wrote Bernard Mylonas, “what Vigo’s Zéro de sous-préfet. Conduite was to do for life in a boarding school,” and it gave …In his autobiography Renoir expressed the hope “that no Michel Simon, playing the recruit’s valet, his first substantial screen trace exists of this masterpiece of banality.” After its brief release in role. Richard Abel considered it “Renoir’s most underrated silent 1924, Dieudonné withdrew the film for re-editing, and re-released it film” and “a first-rate social satire.” three years later; in neither version did it achieve much success. But …Renoir welcomed the coming of sound with delight, Renoir, eager to direct on his own account, proceeded with much of hailing it as “a magical transformation, as if someone had opened a the same team to make La Fille de l’eau (1924). secret door of communication between the filmmaker and his Once again Hessling played a audience.” For a time, though, it seriously victimized heroine, daughter of a canal hampered his career…[as] he was seen as a boatmen who drowns, leaving her at the director of cumbersome and costly period mercy of her brutal and lecherous uncle—a pieces, incapable of working with the speed villain sneeringly portrayed by Renoir’s and efficiency demanded by the new friend Pierre Lestringuez, who also technology. For two years he was unable to provided the scenario. Pierre Renoir, by find backing, until in 1931 his friend Pierre now a leading stage actor, made a brief Braunberger set up a production company appearance as a pitchfork-wielding peasant. with Roger Richebé and took over the old Most of the film was shot on location in the Billancourt studios. Even then Renoir had to forest of Fontainbleau and on the banks of prove himself, and to do so shot his first the Loing, showing Renoir, in Richard sound film in six days for 200,000 francs. Roud’s view, “already capable of capturing This was a scatological Feydeau farce, On on the screen the atmosphere and beauty of purge Bébé (1931), concerning the landscape, and of suggesting that almost constipated son of a manufacturer of pagan reverence for nature which was to run unbreakable chamber pots, with a cast that through much of his work.” Together with included Michel Simon and (in his screen this pictorial realism came a strong element debut) Fernandel. It found instant success, of fantasy, in particular some hallucinatory recouping its cost within a week of opening; dream sequences….Jacques Brunius, who the fidelity with which the soundtrack later often worked with Renoir, wrote that captured the flush of a lavatory was widely La Fille de l’eau was the first film to show appreciated. … “a really dream-like dream.” Having passed his test, Renoir was allowed to start work on The general public, though, was not much taken with the the first of his major films, La Chienne (1931)….”During the picture, and Renoir, temporarily despairing of the cinema, opened making of La Chienne, I was ruthless and, I must admit, intolerable. an art gallery in Paris. Since he never had much head for business, I made the film the way I wanted it, with no reference to the this foundered after a few months. In any case, the pull of movie- producer’s wishes. I never showed an inch of film or a scrap of making proved too strong, and towards the end of 1925 he began to dialogue, and I arranged for the rushes to remain invisible until the work on an ambitious new project: an adaptation of Zola’s novel film was complete.” The producer, Roger Richebé, who had Nana, planned as the first Franco-German coproduction and expected a farce, “found himself watching a somber, hopeless lavishly budgeted at over a million francs. The script was again by drama with a murder for light relief” and banished Renoir from the Lestringuez, in collaboration with Renoir himself and Zola’s studio, calling in Paul Fejös to re-edit the material. When Fejös daughter Denise Leblond-Zola, and the sets and costumes were refused, Renoir was allowed back, and the film opened to a mixed designed by Claude Autant-Lara, the first of several future directors but lively reception. The dispute with Richebé, though, earned Renoir helped to launch. Renoir a reputation for being difficult, and various projects Renoir’s first two films introduce two of the primary including a filmed Hamlet with Michel Simon in the title role—fell themes of his work: nature and the theatre. Generally reckoned as through for want of backing…. the best of his silent movies and visibly influenced by Stroheim, “My work as a director,” Renoir once observed, “starts Nana (1926) traces the rise to fame, via the stage and the bedroom, with the actor….I don’t want the movements of the actors to be of a slum-born girl in Second Empire Paris…. Nana was premiered determined by the camera, but the movements of the camera to be in Paris to a very mixed reception. In some quarters the film was determined by the actors.” Rather than mold his players into a attacked for being part-German, and Renoir himself encountered a predetermined scheme, he would readily modify scenes, dialogue, Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—5 even the whole drift of a film in the light of insights that emerged Kosma, and the editor Marguerite Houllé. The latter, also from a developing performance. One inspired result of such creative sometimes called Marguerite Mathieu, was Renoir’s regular collaboration was Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from companion for most of the decade; though they were never married, Drowning, 1932), a long-neglected film now widely considered the she took the name of Marguerite Renoir, which she used for the rest first of Renoir’s masterpieces; in Sight and Sound (Summer, 1960) of her professional life.… Peter John Dyer described it as “a film of such fresh, simple joy and Madame Bovary (1934), the tragedy of a romantically total harmony between actor, director and setting that one can only discontented woman in a nenteenth-century provincial backwater, is regard it as a perfect example of collective evolution.” a difficult film to assess, since no prints of Renoir’s original version Taken from a popular boulevard farce by René Fauchois seem to have survived. …The failure of Bovary, following three (who was outraged at what he considered a distortion of his work), films which had enjoyed only modest box-office success, left Boudu is built around Michel Simon’s colossal performance in the Renoir’s career at its lowest ebb. He was rescued by Marcel Pagnol, title role. Boudu is a shaggy and disreputable vagabond, who , whose filmed productions of his own plays Marius and Fanny had having lost his beloved dog, decides to proved hugely popular, and who now throw himself into the Seine. He is offered Renoir financial backing and the observed by Lestingois, a bookseller use of his Marseille studios. Following living on the quai, who leaps in to Pagnol’s own example in Angèle, Renoir rescue him. Fancying himself as a decided to film exclusively on location, philanthropist, Lestingois decides to using direct sound and largely non- take Boudu into his household, there professional actors…. to be fed, clothed, and rehabilitated. With Toni, Renoir anticipated The tramp, however, proves the Italian neorealists—and may even ungratefully resistant to the bourgeois have directly influenced them through virtues; he spits in first editions, Luchino Visconti, who worked as his cleans his shoe on the bedspread, assistant on this and several other seduces Lestingois’ wife and makes a pictures. …On his return to Paris, Renoir pass at his mistress, the housemaid. To found himself caught up in the surging regularize the situation, Boudu is exhilaration of the Popular Front, in married off to the maid. As the which many of his closest friends were wedding party floats merrily along the involved, and whose aims and river, Boudu topples overboard; while aspirations were to color all his the rest mourn his death, he surfaces remaining films of the decade. In later downstream, wades ashore, swaps years, particularly after taking up clothes with a scarecrow and strolls off residence in America, Renoir tended to across the summer meadows. play down his political commitment at Boudu has sometimes been this period-as have several of his critics, represented as a pointed and virulent such as Truffaut—in favor of the attack on the bourgeoisie (Gerald Mast serenely detached humanism of his referred to “the venomous energy of postwar films. Indeed, Pierre Leprohon Renoir’s spitting…on the whole of went so far as to say that “any Western civilization”), but such a ‘commitment’ is an abandonment of reading seems difficult to sustain in freedom, of that freedom without which the face of the film’s genial there can be no art.” By this logic, either exuberance—even if no opportunity is Renoir was not, at this time, a politically missed of satirizing the pretensions of committed filmmaker, or the films that the Lestingois household…. he made from Le Crime de Monsieur The anarchistic irreverence of Lange to La Règle du jeu—on most Boudu owes a good deal to the counts, the finest work of his career—are political climate of the time; a similar not art. Either position seems hard to spirit suffuses the Prévert brothers’ sustain. L’Affaire est dans le sac and (in a Though nearly all films are cooler mode) Clair’s À nous la liberté. works of collaboration, and Renoir’s Renoir, though never formally a Jean Renoir by Pierre-Auguste Renoir more than most (“When I make a film, I member, had close contacts with am asking others to influence me”), Le several people in the left-wing agit-prop Groupe Octobre, including Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) is especially so; it bears Renoir’s the Préverts (Pierre Prévert had lent a hand with On purge Bébé and signature as director but should perhaps be credited to the Groupe La Chienne and Jacques Brunius. Brunius, in turn, was among those Octobre, whose first film it was. Aptly enough, the plot celebrates who during the thirties formed part of Renoir’s informal stock collectivity…. company, acting or otherwise assisting as occasion demanded. Predictably enough, Lange was vituperated by the right- Other frequent collaborators (or “accomplices” as Renoir preferred wing press, but otherwise warmly received. Renoir, now considered to call them) included Jacques Becker as assistant director, Claude the leading cinematic spokesman for the Left, was invited by the Renoir (Pierre Renoir’s son) on camera, the composer Joseph Communist Party to make a propaganda film in preparation for the Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—6 forthcoming national elections. His exact role in the making of La restored in 1958, in time to be voted fifth greatest film of all time at Vie est à nous (People of France, 1936) has been variously defined: the Brussels World Fair. “supervising director” probably comes closest. Even more than In recent years the reputation of La Grande Illusion has Lange, La Vie was a collaborative project, made (according to the slipped a little, supplanted as Renoir’s supreme achievement—at credit titles) “by a team of technicians, atists and workers.” Scenes least in most critics’ estimation—by La Règle du jeu.…Renoir was were shot by half-a-dozen other directors beside Renoir, including now generally recognized, even by those who disliked his political Jacques Becker, Jacques Brunius and Henri Cartier-Bresson…. stance, as one of the foremost directors in France. Despite this, he In its brief, seemingly artless simplicity, Partie de could rarely find anyone willing to back the films he wanted to campagne must bne the most perfect unfinished film ever made. make. “Even after La Grande Illusion had made a fortune for its The action, based on Maupassant’s short story, takes place in the producer I had difficulty in raising money for my own projects. I 1860s….One of Renoir’s most personal works, filmed at Marlotte was not, and still am not, ‘commercial.’” The failure of La on the Loing where Auguste Renoir used to paint, Partie de Marseillaise having done little to further his box-office standing, he campagne was shot almost en famille. accepted an assignment from the Hakim Alain, Renoir’s son, took a small role, as brothers’ company, Paris Film, to direct did Marguerite Renoir and the director Jean Gabin in a 1938 version of Zola’s La himself, hamming throatily as the patron Bête Humaine (The Human Beast)— of the inn. Claude Renoir was mainly he later insisted, “because Gabin cinematographer, and most of the stock and I wanted to play with trains.”… company lent a hand with the filming. For Of all Renoir’s films, La Règle du all this, the atmosphere on the shoot seems jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) is the to have been poisonous. Sylvia Bataille, richest and most complex, the most subtly whose hauntingly vulnerable performance composed both in the interweavings of its as Henriette holds the film’s emotional narrative intrigue and in its wider center, recalled days of miserable waiting, implications. ..It is, Penelope Gilliatt bitter quarrels, drunkenness, and wrote, “not only a masterpiece of recrimination—none of which shows in filmmaking, not only a great work of the film’s mood of elegiac nostalgia and humanism in a perfect rococo frame, but bittersweet regret…. also an act of historical testimony.” Renoir Les Bas-Fonds became one of Renoir’s biggest box-office himself, describing the film as “a sort of reconstructed successes. It also earned him the Prix Louis Delluc, and he was documentary…on the condition of asociety at a given moment,” made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the socialist added: “It is a war film, and yet there is no reference to the war. government of Leon Blum. With this prestige, and the support of Beneath its seemingly innocuous appearance the story attacked the Jean Gabin, Renoir finally managed to secure backing for a project very structure of our society.”… he had been working on for three years. La Grande Illusion, Renoir explained, is a war film without heroes or villains, in which “the “The failure of La Règle du jeu so depressed me that I villain is the war.” But not simply the war as such; all the divisive resolved either to give up the cinema or to leave France.” As things barriers—of nation, class, race, or religion which preclude worked out, Renoir chose the latter option. It would be fifteen years fraternity, and which lead to wars, are equally indicted….”I made before he made another film in France. In July 1939, shortly after La Grande Illusion because I am a pacifist,” Renoir affirmed, the disastrous premiere of La Règle, he left for Rome, where he had although he also suggested that been invited by the Scalera the film owed its initial success company to direct a film of to being a prison-break Puccini’s Tosca. His relationship movie….The film was widely with Marguerite Renoir having acclaimed, both in France and ended, his companion on the abroad, as a masterpiece. In New Italian trip (and henceforward) York it ran for twenty-six weeks; was Dido Freire, Cavalcanti’s it was nominated for an Oscar, niece, who had worked with him and President Roosevelt declared as his secretary and continuity that “all the democracies of the assistant. world should see this film.”…At When war broke out in the Venice Biennale, pressure September 1939 Renoir returned was put on the jury not to award home. For the time being, it the top honor, the Mussolini Mussolini remained neutral, and a Cup; a special award, the few months later Renoir was International Jury Cup, had to be persuaded by the French Ministry created instead, after which the Pont des Arts, June 2010 of Information, anxious to film was banned in Italy. It was maintain good relations with Italy, also banned in Germany, and in Belgium….During and to go back and resume filming in Rome. He did so, but had directed immediately after the war the film suffered various cuts (although it only a few shots when in June 1940 Italy declared war on France had been suppressed by the Nazis, it was attacked after the and Renoir departed hastily, leaving the film to his assistants Carl liberation for being pro-German), but the complete version was Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—7

Koch and Luchino Visconti. La Tosca (1941) finally appeared with in Vichy territory….Despite Renoir’s unhappiness, Swamp Water Koch credited as sole director. got good notices and received the New York Critics Award. As the Germans advanced on Paris, Renoir and Dido Having severed his Fox contract, to the relief of both Freire joined the trek southward, finally reaching Auguste Renoir’s parties, Renoir found himself out of work but under no urgent old house at Cagnes, where Renoir’s brother Claude now lived. financial pressure. Towards the end of the year he managed to While there, he received an invitation, couched in seductive terms, secure his son’s passage to America; Alain Renoir arrived in to make films for the German government. “So attractive and December and soon afterwards enlisted in the US Army. In dazzling did their offers become…that I felt it might be better for February 1942 Renoir signed a long-term deal with Universal, but me to leave.” Through the influence of Robert Flaherty and Albert after a few days work on a Deanna Durbin vehicle, Forever Yours, Lewin, who had met him in Paris before the war, Renoir was he asked to be released from his contract…. granted an entry visa to the United States. In December 1940, When, after the war Renoir’s American films were having travelled via Algiers, Casablanca, and Lisbon, he and Dido eventually released in France, none of them aroused much took ship for New York; Renoir found himself sharing a cabin with enthusiasm. The most hostile reception greeted This Land is Mine Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (1943)….With its pasteboard studio sets, well-nourished Renoir arrive in Hollywood in January 1941 and signed a Hollywood faces (Maureen O’Hara, Kent Smith), and ringingly one-year contract with Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox—a relationship sententious dialogue, This Land is Mine seems now absurdly remote characterized, on both sides, by well-meaning incomprehension. from any kind of reality. All that saves it from inanity is the Renoir suggested various subjects, passionate sincerity of Renoir’s including Saint-Exupéry’s Terre des intentions, detectable even through hommes, which the studio turned down Laughton’s barnstorming peroration. The as “too European.” Fox, for their part, same emotional commitment can be felt in came up with a range of action-packed Salute to France (1944), a half-hour melodramas which Renoir politely propaganda film codirected by Renoir and declined. Eventually agreement was Garson Kanin for the Office of War reached on Swamp Water, a script by Information. Alternating staged sequences Dudley Nichols based on a recent with documentary footage, it was intended novel by Vereen Bell, set in the to offer GIs some understanding of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. In its country they were about to liberate. subject—a man falsely accused of (Renoir also recalled having worked, murder and driven to take refuge in the uncredited, on other propaganda films swamp-Renoir may have seen the around this time, but never identified opportunity for an exploration of the them.) In February 1944, while Salute to relations between man, society, and France was in preparation, Renoir and nature. As things turned out, he felt Dido Freire were married. that he had “passed by a great subject Looking back on his Hollywood without penetrating it…but it is still films, Renoir reflected that “while not something to be able to direct a film Jean Renoir by Richard Avedon regretting them, I’m all too well aware that with a story that is not completely they come nowhere near my ideal.” The idiotic.” least unsatisfactory, he felt, was The Southerner (1945); many “What bothered me in Hollywood wasn’t interference,” critics have agreed….The film was based on a novel by George Renoir later explained. “I love interference; it produces discussion, Sessions Perry, Hold Autumn in Your Hand, about the struggles of a and discussion frequently helps you improve your work….People poor farming family in Texas. Renoir wrote his own script (with believe that Hollywood producers are very greedy and think only of some uncredited help from William Faulkner), and was given earning lots of money, but that’s not true. The defect is much more complete freedom to film as he wanted, largely on location with a dangerous: they want their films to be technically perfect.” The small crew and relatively unknown actors. His set designer was shooting of Swamp Water (1941), he had assumed, would allow Eugène Lourié, who had worked on La Grande Illusion and La him to escape from the studio and film on location in the Règle du jeu….”Physically,” James Agee wrote in The Nation, it is Okefenokee itself. Zanuck maintained that Fox could build a one of the most sensitive and beautifully American-made pictures I swamp as good or even better than Nature’s in the controllable have seen….It gets perfectly the mournful, hungry mysteriousness environment of the studio. In the end, Renoir was allowed to film a of a Southern country winter.” He was less happy with the actors, few exteriors in Georgia with his lead actor, Dana Andrews, but most of whom he found “screechingly, unbearably wrong. They with none of the other players, not any sound equipment. Swamp didn’t walk right, stand right, eat right, sound right or look right, sound effects would be created back in the studio, along with the and…it was clear that the basic understanding and the basic rest of the film. emotional and mental…attitudes were wrong, to the point of Renoir completed Swamp Water in a state of misery. unintentional insult.”… The Southerner was picketed and Though he got on well with his cast and crew, the Fox approach to boycotted throughout the South and banned in Agee’s native filmmaking baffled and depressed him. “I ask you not to judge my Tennessee. Elsewhere, though, it was warmly received. Winning an work in America by this film, which will be Mr. Zanuck’s and not Oscar nomination (for best director) and several other awards, and mine,” he told Dudley Nichols. “I would rather sell peanuts in becoming the only commercial hit of Renoir’s American period. … Mexico than make films at Fox.” He was further hampered by his For the last film of his American period, Renoir returned to limited English, and by worries about his son Alain, who was still RKO, for whom he had made This Land is Mine. As with Madame Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—8

Bovary, it is difficult to assess The Woman on the Beach (1947), inadequacies. At least, they do so in the French version; the since the original (which no longer survives) was heavily cut and American version, which Warners truncated, partially reshot, and reshot. This time, though, no heavy-handed executive can be released under the title Paris Does Strange Things, is probably blamed; the butcher was Renoir himself…. beyond redemption. Renoir, furious, disowned it. For Renoir, as for other European exiles with a history of “I’ve spent my life trying to raise money for my prewar leftist sympathies, the political climate in the USA was productions,” Renoir once ruefully remarked. “With a few starting to turn cold; for this and other reasons, he was coming to exceptions, I’ve never succeeded—and then only thanks to the feel himself alienated from Hollywood. “Since the death of intercession of Providence.” The commercial and critical failure of Lubitsch,” he observed sadly, “the idea of a filmmaker, as such, has Elena, which had been far from cheap to make, exacerbated his vanished from Hollywood. It happens all too often that the post of difficulties; during the remaining twenty-three years of his life, he director consists of little more than a folding chair with his name on was able to direct only four more films…. it.” California remained his second home; his son Alain was Disliking what he saw as a pursuit of bland technical studying at Santa Barbara, with a view to an academic career, and perfection in the contemporary cinema…Renoir began to just after the war Renoir had become a naturalized American, investigate the potential of a younger medium. Television, he retaining dual French-US citizenship. But America no longer believed, was “in a technically primitive state which may restore to seemed a good place to make films in, although some unspecified artists that fighting spirit of the early cinema, when everything that reluctance prevented Renoir returning directly to France. Instead he was made was good.” In the hope of revitalizing the cinema through embarked on a long detour, by way of India and Italy. the introduction of fast, cheap TV techniques, he planned a film to While still struggling to salvage Woman on the Beach be shot live for television, which would then receive immediate Renoir had come across Rumer Godden’s The River, a semi- cinematic release…. autobiographical novel based on her own Anglo-Indian childhood, In Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Picnic on the Grass, 1959), s and had secured an option on it. Backing proved hard to come its title suggests, Renoir paid his most direct homage to the world of by….Working closely together, Renoir and Godden devised a script the impressionist painters in which he grew up. Filmed in and which, with each successive draft, diverged further from around the Provencal estate of Les Collettes, where August Renoir conventional narrative structure to incorporate documentary and spent the last years of his life, it offers a long lyrical hymn to lyrical episodes, ending up as (in Renoir’s words) “an Occidental nature, luxuriating in the warm southern summer landscape….It meditation on the Orient….I wanted to bear witness to a civilization was eight years [from Cordelier, 1959] before Renoir was able to which wasn’t based on profit.” The picture was to be shot entirely make another film—eight years during which the man generally on location in India, and in color—the first color film that either acknowledged as France’s most distinguished filmmaker could find Renoir or his nephew Claude, the cinematographer, had ever no one to back his projects….Meanwhile Renoir busied himself worked on…. with writing….Renoir’s last years were spent mainly in California. In July 1951 Renoir arrived in Italy, a few days before The He was paid all the expected honors and tributes; in April 1975 he River won the International Critics Prize at the Venice Biennale. received a special Academy Award for his “grace, responsibility, This was fortuitous; he had come to direct an Italian-French-British and enviable competence” as a filmmaker. An autobiography of coproduction, The Golden Coach (1953), originally planned for sorts, Ma vie et mes films, appeared in 1974, and he wrote three Visconti. (It was released in three languages, but Renoir always more novels…. considered the English version to be the original, since the other Today few would dispute Renoir’s status as one of the two were post-synched.)… greatest of all filmmakers, and most would accept that the films he With French Cancan (1955), Renoir made his long- made between 1932 and 1939 (from Boudu, that is, to La Régle du awaited return to the French film industry, and also to the jeu) include half-a-dozen of the supreme masterpieces of the Monmartre of his boyhood. Conceived as a riposte to the cinema. Hollywood view of Bel Époque shown in Huston’s Moulin Rouge, the film offers a romanticized account of the founding of the Moulin by Ziegler (called Danglard in the film, and played, in his fourth and last role for Renoir, by Jean Gabin)….Like The Golden Coach, French Cancan is frankly and unashamedly theatrical, its Montmartre an idealized studio construction complete with crescent moon….Renoir’s preoccupation with theatre at this period was not limited to the subjects of his films; he was also branching out as a playwright and stage director. On 10th July 1954 he directed single open-air production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Roman arena at Arles to commemorate the 2,000th anniversary of Caesar’s founding of the city…. In making Elena, Renoir was fulfilling a long-standing ambition to shoot a film with Ingrid Bergman, and especially one in which she could be seen “laughing and smiling.” Filming, as it turned out was less happy experience due to linguistic problems; neither Bergman nor Ferrer spoke French, and the rest of the cast knew little English. Despite this, the warmth and gaiety of Bergman’s performance glow from the screen, and almost contrive—with the help of Claude Renoir’s vibrant color From François Truffaut, “Introduction” to André Bazin, Jean photography—to carry the film over its dramatic and political Renoir. Da Capo Press NY 1992 Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—9

No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, value of a scene. Drama, action—in the theatrical or novelistic detachment, or equanimity, André Bazin and Jean Renoir have sense of the terms—are for him only pretext for the essential, and meant too much to me for me to be able to speak of them the essential is everywhere in what is visible, everywhere in the dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean very substance of the cinema. Of course, drama is necessary—that Renoir by André Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by is what we go to the movies to see—but the story can get along the best critic, about the best director. easily by itself. It is sufficient to sketch just enough of it so that the audience has the satisfaction of understanding. That done, the real film remains to be made: character, objects, light, all must be arranged in the story like colors in a drawing, without being directly subordinated to it. At times the very interest of the finished product may be in the fact that the colors do not fit neatly within the contours of the drawing. The effects Renoir created out of the overlapping seem all the more subtle because he knows how to stay within the lines beautifully when he wants to. Let us return to Boudu Saved from Drowning. Boudu throws himself in the water without knowing why. Because he was hot? Because he has lost his dog? Because he didn’t like the looks of a cop? What difference does it make? Boudu throws himself into the river. That is all you need to know. You would perhaps like some shots to show you how Boudu tries to drown himself. That André Bazin “Boudu Saved from Drowning” 1932 would be sadistic. You don’t want to try, so let him handle it by One of the most paradoxically appealing aspects of Jean himself, and be satisfied with being told about it. You would do Renoir’s work is that everything he does is so casual. He is the only better to look at the Pont des Arts (which seems to be made of filmmaker in the world who can afford to treat the cinema with such match sticks and which sags under the weight of the crowd) and the apparent offhandedness. It took Renoir to muster the audacity to fishermen along the banks of the Seine who are yelling because all film Gorki on the banks of the Marne or to handle the casting as he the commotion is scaring the fish. did on The Rules of the Game, in which almost all the actors, except Besides, isn’t all the distraction which the camera imposes the servants, are so marvelously out of their usual characters. If one on you the greatest possible measure of fidelity to the action, had to describe the art of Renoir in a word, one could define it as because it makes you behave as Boudu himself would act if it were the art of discrepancy. Boudu Saved From Drowning is no you who had jumped into the water? exception: in this film the scenario is tangential to the subject; the The discrepancy between dramatic content and its visual casting incidental to the characters; and the plot, oblique to the presentation, then, is the principal medium of Renoir’s irony. situation. Only the découpage [framing and camera movement] is to the point, for it is the editing which directs the dance with diabolical Manuscript Notes: cleverness and which shapes the contradictory elements in this 1. Function of music in Boudu. Essentially an erotic aesthetic universe into a coherent style. indicator: sometimes foreboding (for example, the I would not go so far as to say that the best moments in barrel organ in the street), sometimes suggestive Boudu are those which are most false. But while the pinnacles of (when Anne-Marie hums, when Lestingois picks out Renoir’s work are often remarkable for the sureness and realism of “Les Fleurs du Jardin…” on the piano), sometimes their tone, they also sometimes owe their dazzling impact to triumphant and symbolic (the military horn in the carefully contrived dramatic disharmonies. engraving on the wall over Mme. Lestingois’s bed). One of the best scenes in Boudu Saved from Drowning, the You could say that whenever we hear music in Boudu suicide attempt from the Pont des Arts, was made in total defiance we know that someone is aroused. … of the logic of the scene. The crowd of unpaid extras gathered on 2. Boudu’s charm lies in its glorification of vulgarity. It the bridge and the river banks was not there to witness a tragedy. portrays the most blatant lubricity in a civilized and They came to watch a movie being made, and they were in good nonchalant manner. Boudu is a magnificently obscene humor. Far from asking them to feign the emotion which film. versimilitude would demand, Renoir seems to have encouraged 3. Everything that an actor can be in a film. Michel them in their light-hearted curiosity. The film does not for a Simon is in Boudu. Everything! moment convince us that the crowd is interested in Boudu. Some of the spectators turn around to get a better look at the cameraman, Some books on Renoir (from FilmReference.com): much as in the earliest newsreels when people had not yet grown Davay, Paul, Jean Renoir , Brussels, 1957. accustomed to the camera. And, as if he felt the falseness of the Cauliez, Armand-Jean, Jean Renoir , Paris, 1962. acting were not sufficiently apparent, Renoir had some rapid shots Chardère, Bernard, editor, Jean Renoir , in Premier Plan (Lyon), taken from behind the crowd which leave no doubt of its lack of emotion. no. 22–24, May 1962. This incongruity is reinforced by the fact that Renoir is one Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, Analyses des films of the masters of photographic realism, the heir of the tradition of de Jean Renoir , Paris, 1964. the naturalistic novel and its contemporary, Impressionist painting. Bennett, Susan, Jean Renoir , London, 1967. A fraction of these “mistakes” would condemn any other director. Leprohon, Pierre, Jean Renoir , Paris, 1967; New York, 1971. But they are an integral part of the style of Jean Renoir, often the best part of it. For Renoir, what is important is not the dramatic Poulle, François, Renoir 1938; ou, Jean Renoir pour rien: Enquête Renoir—BOUDU SAVE FROM DROWNING—10 sur un cinéaste , Paris, 1969. Cavagnac, Guy, Jean Renoir: Le désir du monde , Paris, 1994. Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films , New York, Leutrat, Jean-Louis, Le chiene de Jean Renoir , Crisnée, 1994. 1972. Boston, Richard, Boudu Saved From Drowning , London, 1994. Bazin, André, Jean Renoir , edited by François Truffaut, Paris, O'Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir , New York, 2000. 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir , Berkeley, 1974. Beylie, Claude, Jean Renoir: Le Spectacle, la vie , Paris, 1975. Renoir, Jean, Essays, Conversations, Reviews , edited by Penelope Gilliatt, New York, 1975. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: Volume 1: The Great Tradition , New York, 1976. Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources , Boston, 1979. Sesonske, Alexander, Jean Renoir: The French Films 1924–1939 , Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980. Gauteur, Claude, editor, Jean Renoir: Oeuvres de cinéma inédites , Paris, 1981. McBride, Joseph, editor, Filmmakers on Filmmaking 2 , Los Angeles, 1983. Serceau, Daniel, Jean Renoir , Paris, 1985. Bertin, Celia, Jean Renoir , Paris, 1986. Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir ,

Princeton, New Jersey, 1986. For some recent photos of and on Pont des Arts, visit Vincendeau, Ginette, and Keith Reader, La Vie est à Nous: French http://brucejacksonphotography.us/pontdesarts/index.html Cinema of the Popular Front , London, 1986. Viry-Babel, Roger, Jean Renoir: Le Jeu et la règle , Paris, 1986.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXI: September 14 John Huston, The Maltese Falcon 1941 September 21 Alfred Hitchcock North by Northwest 1959 September 28 Kent Mackenzie The Exiles 1963 October 5 Federico Fellini 8½ 1963 October 12 Mike Nichols Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966 October 19 Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather 1972 October 26 Hal Ashby The Last Detail 1973 November 2 Bruce Beresford Tender Mercies 1983 November 9 Wim Wenders Wings of Desire 1987 November 16 Charles Crichton A Fish Called Wanda 1988 November 23 Joel & Ethan Coen The Big Lebowski 1998 November 30 Chan-wook Park Oldboy 2003 December 7 Deepa Mehta Water 2005

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