Streaming – R. Emmet Sweeney

The Swashbuckling Lover: Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 17, 2017

By 1926 director King Vidor and star John Gilbert were one of MGM’s most bankable duos, thanks to the massive success of their WWI drama The Big Parade (1925). They were immediately thrust into the similarly high-minded period piece La Bohème (1926), and were cast in The Glory Diggers, about the construction of the Panama Canal. But MGM had to drop the latter project, and to keep them working swiftly re-assigned both of them to Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) instead, a tongue-in-cheek romantic adventure in the Douglas Fairbanks mold. It was a departure for the duo, but they proved to have the appropriately light touch, and Gilbert flies across the screen as if sprung from a trampoline. Gilbert pokes fun at his “Great Lover” persona, here pushed into a seducer caricature of Casanovian proportions. Once thought lost, an incomplete print was discovered in France in 2006 and restored by Lobster Films. The third reel is missing, with that section filled in with inter-titles and stills. It is this version that is on DVD from Flicker Alley and is now streaming on FilmStruck.

King Vidor was “a little ashamed” of Bardelys the Magnificent, while John Gilbert considered it to be “Applesauce. With one John Gilbert providing the sauce.” It didn’t have the cachet of their previous films together, though seen today it’s a vibrant and funny film, one adapted from the 1905 novel by Rafael Sabatini. John Gilbert is the title character Bardelys, a womanizing adviser to King Louis XIII, he warns his servant to always let him know which husbands are in town before he schedules his assignations. But even when angry spouses drop in and challenge him to a sword fight, he flatters them so relentlessly (both their looks and their fighting skill), that they go away happy. Bardelys is such a well-known lover that almost every woman in town has been called “dark enchantress” and received a locket with a piece of his hair, meant to symbolize his devotion – they are assembled in bulk by his servants and dispensed with impunity.

The Comte de Châtellerault (Roy D’arcy) has no such luck with women. He was very publicly rejected by Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman, to become Vidor’s wife after filming) before tripping over a precisely placed lunchbox and falling on his behind. The Comte becomes the laughingstock of Paris, and in a fit of pique, he makes an impossible wager with Bardelys – if Bardelys can get Roxalanne to marry him, he will receive all of the Comte’s wealth. And if he fails, Bardelys must give up his entire fortune. Bardelys is in no mood to marry, but accepts the bet anyway, as a test of his desirability. In order to win the anti-monarchy Roxalanne’s heart, Bardelys pretends to be famed revolutionary Lesperon. It is in this guise that Roxalanne’s reserve begins to crack, but soon Bardelys will have the King’s guards on his tale, and it’s more than money he has to put on the line.

Vidor films with great agility, moving his camera in inventive ways, including dropping down with Bardelys out of a window. The most memorable shot is a ravishingly romantic one, of a canoe ride with Bardelys and Roxalanne, weeping willow branches drooping down over them like a caressing lover. King Vidor recalled the construction of the scene in his memoirs, as quoted in a post on TCM.com:

“I saw a property man wading in the lake pushing an old rowboat he had brought along just in case the director asked for one. He brushed past the lone branch of a weeping willow tree hanging in the water. I asked the head grip: ‘How long will it take you to make a tunnel of willow branches one hundred feet long?’ The leaves threw a moving pattern of light and shadow which played moodily across the faces of the lovers. The arrangement, movement and lighting of the scene were in complete harmony. The total effect was one of magic.” Vidor added that he was often asked about that scene. “They have forgotten the title, the actors, the author, even the melodramatic plot, but the magic of the camera made its indelible impression.”

Also making an impression is Bardelys’s wild escape from the gallows, a remarkably inventive bit of madcap action that has Gilbert springing around with uncanny mobility. In my favorite bit, he is trying to escape back up through a hatch, but a group of soldiers are thrusting their scythes into the opening below him. Taking this as an opportunity, when the scythes all clash together, it forms a kind of floor which Bardelys uses as leverage to leap up and out of the hatch. It is a brilliant bit of stagecraft, and manages to display the wit of Bardelys solely through action.

Arthur Lubin, who plays King Louis XIII, recalled that the set was a happy one, and speculated that “I think the reason King was so well liked was that he left the actors alone.” That convivial atmosphere really comes across on the screen, though Gilbert himself expressed unhappiness with the whole production. He told Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times that “I don’t want to be portraying this incredible ‘magnificent’ stuff. Whenever they talk ‘costume picture’ to me again, I am going to mentally translate all the characters into modern clothes and see how they would work out in say, Pasadena, today. If they don’t ring true, they are out.”

The film was a minor success, bringing back a profit of $135,000 on a cost of $460,000. But for all involved it was a minor affair, a diversion from the other work they’d rather be doing. MGM felt similarly, for when their rights to the Sabatini novel expired in 1936, they destroyed the negative. The movie would have been lost forever if not for the miraculous discovery of that print in France. Thankfully, we can now see the film for what it is, an impressively mounted off-the-cuff adventure that could give Fairbanks a run for his money.

To Have and To Hold: Losing Ground (1982)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 3, 2017

Losing Ground (1982) is a shape-shifting drama of an imploding marriage, insinuating itself into the diverging head-spaces of a pair of quarreling intellectuals. Shot on a shoestring budget in 1982 by City College of New York professor Kathleen Collins, it was one of the first features directed by a black woman since the 1920s. Distributors didn’t know what to do with a black art film, so after a few festival screenings and an airing on public television, it disappeared from view. Thanks to the efforts of Kathleen Collins’ daughter Nina and Milestone Films, this remarkable feature was finally released into theaters in 2015, and now it’s available on a lovely DVD and Blu-ray, and is streaming on FilmStruck.

Collins wrote and directed Losing Ground, shooting in New York City and Rockland County on a budget of $125,000. The film centers on the relationship between literature professor Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her painter husband Victor (Bill Gunn). Sara is cold, calculating and withholding, while Victor is impulsive, bombastic and outgoing. She has strict routines of writing and researching while Victor goes on instinct. His latest instinct is to spend a month in a house upstate so he can paint the local Puerto Rican community (especially, and exclusively, the women). All Sara wants is a library nearby so she can continue researching her book on aesthetics. Victor expects her to figure out study arrangements on the fly, placing his job, his art, before hers. The trip only exacerbates their differences, and neither gives any ground to the other. This is a movie in which neither spouse is completely sympathetic.

This was Collins’ second feature after the 50-minute The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980, available as an extra on the Losing Ground DVD/Blu-ray), in which she adapted Henry H. Roth’s short story collection The Cruz Chronicles about a Puerto Rican family. Made for only $5,000, Collins recalled it was “terribly hard” to make, but it laid the groundwork for Losing Ground. She made both while a professor at the City College of New York, teaching film history and screenwriting. She had a masters in French literature from the Sorbonne, but a course she took there on adapting literature into film ignited her interest in cinema (previous to her academic career, she was a civil rights activist for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Collins began writing scripts while making a living as an editor for the BBC and a variety of other television stations. But she couldn’t secure any funding for her projects, recalling that “nobody would give any money to a black woman to direct a film. It was probably the most discouraging time of my life.” It was through the encouragement of one of her students, Ronald K. Gray, who would be her cinematographer, that she stubbornly carried on, and was able to scrape together enough funds for Losing Ground.

Victor is working through a personal and artistic crisis, as he shifts from abstract to figural canvases, he spends most of his time with a young dancer he meets in town, his model and mid-life crisis muse. Sara yearns for escape, so accepts an offer from one of her students to act in his student film, a loose adaptation of the “Frankie and Johnnie” lovers-on-the-run folk blues song. It is on that shoot that she enjoys her own awakening.

Sara asserts control of her environment from the first shot of her lecture on existentialism. She speaks with emphatic enunciation, seeking clarity and directness. After the talk, a student clumsily tries to flirt with her by telling her he hoped her husband appreciated her. Sara pauses, a little shocked at this intrusion of her home life into this workspace – that pause indicates the barriers she erects between the two. Victor is introduced working on a canvas while drinking champagne at their apartment, totally collapsing his art and his life. It is essential for him to intertwine his work and his personal life, as one informs the other. As played by Bill Gunn (a fine filmmaker in his own right – see Ganja and Hess [1973]), Victor has bought into the idea that virility is the key to his inspiration, a machismo that he uses to justify all kinds of indelicate actions. His first act is to suggest to trip upstate, a journey that would aid his artistic practice, and one sure to delay Sara’s book project.

As Victor’s retreat looks more and more like a way for him to have an affair by other means, Sara’s reserve begins to crack. Her carefully drawn barriers between work and life collapse as Victor keeps intruding. She escapes into the film production, letting her hair down and dancing with a charismatic out-of-work actor named Duke (Duane Jones, Night of the Living Dead [1968]). This performance seems to free something in her, and allows her to discover creative ways out of her collapsing marriage. She begins to see Victor for what he is, and in the most brutally honest line in the movie, she spits out, “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic, like it was some goddamn paintbrush!” That is a line too harsh and too true to come back from. The film ends in a scene of creative violence, a gunshot in the film-within-a-film providing a definitive end to their affair. Tragically, this would be Collins’s final film, as she would die in 1988 of breast cancer at age 46.

It is thanks to Nina Lorez Collins that we are able to see her mother’s brilliant work. In 2010, DuArt was closing it’s film processing lab, and disposing of their vast archive of material. It included the original 16mm negative of Losing Ground. DuArt contacted Nina, and with the assistance of Milestone Film, the material was preserved and scanned for home video and digital distribution. It could have so easily been trashed at any step along that path, so any viewing of Losing Ground is a gift, and should be welcomed as such.

The Postman: Jour de Fête (1949)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 12, 2017

After a decade-long career as a music-hall performer, Jacques Tati transitioned to feature filmmaking witha comedy about a remarkably gullible postman. Before Tati invented the iconic bumbling bourgeois Hulot (in M. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953), he experimented with a clumsy working class letter carrier, prone to insecure bouts of drinking and falling flat on his face. Jour de fête (1949) exhibits Tati’s elastic expertise at mime, including a tour-de-force drunk bike ride, as well as displaying his immediate talents as a director, constructing brilliantly funny gags through choreography and sound design. All of the gags generate from a small town’s resistance to and obsession with technological advancement, especially as trumpeted by the Americans. Tati eyes all this talk of modernization with a gimlet eye, preferring instead to linger on the absurdities of small town life before they disappear forever.

Having made a name for himself on the music hall circuit, Tati made his way into short films, and gained some notoriety under René Clément, who directed him in the boxing comedy Soigne ton gauche (1936, for which Godard punned on the title for his Keep Your Right Up/Soigne ta droite). It was in this short that Tati took note of the bicycle riding postman played by Max Martel. This character would be the inspiration for his 1947 script The School For Postmen (1947), though in the interim he would be trying to avoid the German occupation government forces, who were seeking him out to work in Berlin for the Nazi organization “Strength Through Joy” as part of the compulsory work service. Instead he ditched them and hid out in the middle of the country in Le Marembert, four miles from Sainte-Sévère, which would be the location of Jour de fête. Tati and his friend Henri Marquet (a co-writer/actor in Jour de fête) chose Le Marembert as a town to hide out in because, Tati’s daughter explains in the documentary A L’Americaine (also on FilmStruck as a supplement to Jour de fête), “They jabbed a pencil into a map of France, Sainte-Sévère is smack in the middle.”

Tati himself continued that “once there, I was surprised. It was wartime, but in Sainte-Sévère, you’d never have known it. It’s fantastic to see people who know how to live. I thought if I made a film one day, I’d shoot it there.” He would stay true to his word, and retained the image of Max Martel’s postman. This would lead to the 1947 short The School For Postmen, a trial run for Jour de fête, in which his bicycling letter carrier is obsessed with proving that he can deliver the mail as fast as modern American technology allows. Originally slated to be directed by René Clément, his dropping out allowed Tati the opportunity to get behind the camera. And it was this experience that led him to believe he could extend this character out to feature length. He shot from May to December of 1947 in Sainte-Sévère, using it as his outdoor set. It was to be shot in a new color process called Thomsoncolor, but it was unstable and acceptable prints could not be struck. So it was distributed in B&W and that is how it is widely known today. However, in 1964 Tati did a re-edit with some painted in color by his friend Paul Grimault, and in 1994 a full color version was struck from the original negatives. All three versions are available to view on FilmStruck.

The story, such as it is, involves the fair coming into to Sainte-Sévère and upsetting the natural tempo of the town. The café owner starts re-painting all his tables and chairs, a tad upsetting to his newly stained patrons, while one of the carnies flirts with one of the local girls. Through these side stories stumbles the insecure postman François (Tati), who endures spitballs from the local kids and endless gibes and pranks from the adults, mostly egging him into drinking games. Too eager to please to ever really object or fight back, he instead complains softly to himself. His track through town becomes an obstacle course of townspeople, carnies and kids all trying to distract him or rile him up, and he either ends up blackout drunk in a train car or roped into helping out someone else with their work (setting up a flagpole, cleaning up farmland, fixing a player piano). These are all intricately arranged set pieces that choreograph a whole village in motion (while the camera remains fairly static). The movement in the frame is never ending, and Tati is ever-eager to cede the frame to a better punchline, whether it’s the cross-eyed spike-driver (he needs to be positioned just a bit to the side) or the hunchbacked old gossip who fills in the details of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood; this 90 minutes feature somehow maps the whole town while also finding time to sketch each individual personality.

What François values above all is his job, so when he views a newsreel of all the new U.S. postal delivery technology, from helicopter drops to automated sorting machines, he blows a gasket and tries to prove he can match the Americans’ speed with his own two-wheeler. What ensues is nothing less than a Buster Keaton-esque study in human transportation gone awry, like in Sherlock Jr. (1924) when he loses his driver and rides a motorcycle side-saddle to a series of death-defying near misses. In Tati’s case he just loses his bicycle, which starts riding down the road on its own, as if possessed by a demon. Tati chases it down as if his life depended on it because his reputation hinges upon this mere mode of transportation. His bike goes through all forms of indignities – losing wheels, getting caught on a railroad crossing gate, getting dunked in a river. But it’s all for the greater good (or so François believes), of delivering the mail with speed, “American-style,” he keeps saying. So he is sticking the mail in grain sorters, shoving it on a butcher’s cutting board (which swiftly gets chopped), and sticking it under a horse’s tail. No time for customer service, as long as the mail gets delivered, no matter the condition, he will be satisfied. That is, until he can move no more, and the old hunchback drags him out of the water and tells him, “News is rarely good, so let it take its sweet time.”

Tati prefers the town stay as it is. But his depiction is already old-fashioned, as these towns became more mechanized, less personable. And so he had found a theme that would carry him through the films to follow, though he would need a new character, one more upwardly mobile to explore the ever dehumanized city, if not less prone to pratfalls. So Monsieur Hulot was born: the latest, and certainly the most oblivious cog in the industrial machine.

Another Day in the Country: Picnic on the Grass (1959)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

August 22, 2017

For Jean Renoir Picnic on the Grass was both a return and a departure. It was filmed in and around the country estate of Les Collettes, his late father’s land, where he had grown up as a child. It is the perfect setting for this back-to-nature comedy in which a scientist (and hopeful presidential candidate), is lured away from the world of the mind for that of the flesh. But instead of using this return to indulge in nostalgia or reiterate the naturalistic style of his still-famous triumphs – Renoir pushes further into farce and caricature. Picnic on the Grass is a broad and joyful comedy that was inevitably compared with Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937), which had been restored and re-released around the same time, and so Renoir was compared to his previous self, and found wanting. Jonas Mekas, writing in The Village Voice in 1960, had a profound experience watching Picnic on the Grass and was baffled by its failure – he wrote: “I hear the critics did not like it. Who are the critics? Critics like to talk big – poor nearsighted things! They do not see beauty even when it is there.” FilmStruck presents us with another opportunity to see this beauty, so I attempted to find it there.

Picnic on the Grass was marked by the death of Gabrielle Renard, the nanny who raised Jean Renoir and became one of his father’s models. She brought Jean to see his first film in 1897 at the Palais des Nouveauté. Biographer Pascal Merigeau relates that the screening “threw him into a panic” and that Gabrielle had to rush him outside to calm down. She was a beloved figure in his life, and he devotes many tender passages to her in his memoirs, including these memorable closing lines:

As I bid farewell to the landscape of my childhood I think of Gabrielle. Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guignol and the Theatre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. My farewell to childhood may be expressed in very few words: ‘Wait for me, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle passed away on February 26, 1959, and Picnic on the Grass began shooting in July in Les Collettes, where they had originally formed their bond so many years before.

Renoir had been working on the script since 1958, when he registered a 32-page treatment. The story concerns Etienne Alexis (Paul Meurisse), a television-famous scientist whose main political position is mandatory artificial insemination as a way to increase intelligence in children. Despite this frightening proposition, through complete voter apathy he is likely to be the next president of Europe. That is, until he takes a fateful picnic with his equally ascetic bride-to-be/girl scout leader Marie-Charlotte (Ingrid Nordine). A satyr-like shepherd plays his flute for his goat, conjuring up a strong wind that blows past Etienne’s party and magically juices their libidos. As friends and assistants start canoodling under the trees (reminiscent of the scene in Elena and her Men [1956] with a mass-peasant makeout session), Etienne and his new chambermaid Nénette (Catherine Rouvel) begin an extended flirtation that might bring down his entire candidacy. While his advisers continue to set-up a wedding with Marie-Charlotte, Etienne’s eyes keep roaming to Nénette, a disarmingly direct farm girl who was seeking artificial insemination because she had never found a man worth her time.

Renoir cast Catherine Rouvel after being introduced to her after a screening of Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948). She had just turned nineteen, and Pascal Merigeau believes she reminded him of Gabrielle: “Returning to Les Collettes and his father’s house, among the olive trees, on the banks of the river, Renoir recommuned with his youth, rediscovered Gabrielle’s former features and soft curves, as well as Dedee’s, his first love, in Catherine Rouvel.” There is a resemblance, at least going by Auguste Renoir’s many portraits of Gabrielle, and Rouvel dazzles in the part, presenting Nénette as supremely self-confident in her naïveté – a completely charming creation.

Now in the twilight of his career, he was struggling to secure funding for new projects, and would end up producing Picnic on the Grass himself, necessitating a lower budget and tight shooting schedule. It was filmed over 20 days, reusing the studio and crew from The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment (1959), his TV adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which he had completed earlier in the year. Precise blocking was drawn out with chalk on the floor, and the actors had to follow them. Renoir later regretted the restrictions the budget required, complaining that working in this way “kills something extremely important, which is the actor’s surprise at being faced with the scenery.”

But Renoir tended to rate his own features based on financial returns, and the film was essentially ignored upon release, and gave Renoir “a pathological distaste for all the processes relating to film or television.” But looking at it outside of the pressure cooker of Renoir’s box office expectations, it’s a film that lives in the zone between the ridiculous and the sublime, happy to look the fool in search of what Renoir valued in life – which according to this film is, in no particular order: lazing about the riverside, eating heartily and sex (preferably outside). Renoir is deeply discouraged by modernity, opening on a parody of the evening news – which spends more time on his pending nuptials than his grotesque plan for population control. It is prescient in depicting how news was sliding ever closer towards entertainment.

Renoir’s POV comes through most clearly in a monologue by a priest out on a walk, telling Etienne what he thinks about his technocratic capitalism.

“Tomorrow you’ll send us to the moon. And, pray tell, what will we do up there on the moon? Do you think we’ll be happier there than under the shade of our olive trees? Scientific dictatorship will be a fine mess. We built the Notre-Dame, we built Chartres. We covered the Earth with cathedrals and churches. You? You’re covering it with factories. You must admit that the smoke from our incense is less damaging to the atmosphere than your atomic radiations. It appears that men enjoy being poisoned.

But, as Renoir well knows, whether or not he disapproves of the flow of history, it will flow on anyway, so you might as well get pleasure where you can. So Etienne and Nénette find themselves in each other, and that will have to be enough.

This is the thirteenth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)

Elena and Her Men (1956)

This Land is Your Land: The Southerner (1945)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney4 Comments

July 25, 2017

Jean Renoir considered The Southerner (1945) to be his “only work of a personal nature carried out in Hollywood.” Adapted from the National Book Award winning novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, by George Sessions Perry, it follows a year in the life of a struggling Texas tenant farmer and his family. A lyrical portrait of do-it-yourself Americanism, it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including one for Best Director (Billy Wilder would win for The Lost Weekend). Sam Tucker (Zachary Scott) is passionately, almost irrationally obsessed with farming a plot of land, even if he’s working it for another owner. So he quits his cotton-picking job and enters into a tenant-farming agreement with his boss, tilling a plot left unworked for years. For him it’s a kind of freedom, though he is gambling that he can harvest enough crop to feed his family and begin to save for a better life. He’s a more responsible version of Boudu from Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), both seek a way off the grid and find it in rural sections of the country. But Sam has family responsibilities, while Boudu only answers to himself.

(Full Disclosure: I work for Kino Lorber, who released The Southerner on DVD and Blu-ray)

After the Nazi occupation of France, Renoir secured a United States visa and arrived at a dock in the port of Jersey City on December 31, 1940, where he was greeted by Robert Flaherty, who had facilitated his arrival. His first Hollywood production was Swamp Water (1941), a Georgia outlaw romance, on which he regularly clashed with producer Daryl Zanuck. He wrote of Zanuck: “Our story was feasible, more or less. He’s managed to turn it into something I find totally stupid” (quoted in Jean Renoir: A Biography, by Pascal Merigeau). Though a financial success, Renoir was not pleased with the experience. He then signed with Universal, who assigned him to the Deanna Durbin vehicle The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943). He worked on it for fifty days before he left the production, citing pain in his leg, which was a cover for his unhappiness with the project, though Durbin was ” a nice girl.” He would jump from there to RKO, to direct the Dudley Nicholas penned and produced This Land is Mine (1943), about the resistance movement in an unnamed Nazi-occupied country. Nichols was passionate about the film, which starred Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara and George Sanders, and controlled the production tightly. He didn’t allow the use of a crane, citing budgetary restraints, and disallowed any improvisatory deviation from the script. Renoir directed it, but was not in full control.

The Southerner, on the other hand, proved an ideal film for Renoir because the producers had little interest in it. Robert Hakim, a friend and producer of La Bête humaine (1938), asked Renoir to read a proposed screenplay of Hold August in Your Hand, by Hugo Butler. He was intrigued by the possibility, and after going back to the original novel, agreed to direct if he was allowed to come up with his own script – which would also pass through the hands of Nunnally Johnson and William Faulkner. Zachary Scott later claimed that Faulkner wrote the entire script, but Merigeau’s biography indicates Renoir wrote the majority, and that Faulkner reworked two scenes, on in which Sam Tucker lights the stove for the first time, and the sequence where the family catches a giant catfish. Hakim secured distribution through United Artists, who sent David L. Loew to be a co-producer. This was not a prestige title for Hakim or Loew, and so Renoir was pretty much left alone to recreate a Texas farm at the General Service Studios, located between Santa Monica and Las Palmas.

Initially Joel McCrea and his wife Frances Dee were sought to star, but they eventually cast Zachary Scott and Betty Field as Sam and Nona Tucker, the husband and wife who would try to transform a fallow pile of wood, rocks and dirt into a working farm. Scott spends most of the film shirtless or nearly so, his character exhibiting a serious buttoning phobia. The lithe Scott is the object of adoration for the women of the town, and for good reason, as every other eligible bachelor is either a drunk or a kindly old timer. The Tuckers are introduced in a massive field picking cotton, when their uncle Pete collapses and with his final breath urges them to farm their own land. Sam takes him at his word, and convinces his boss to become a tenant farmer on one of his disused plots. The house is collapsing, the ground overgrown, and his neighbor Devers (J. Carroll Naish) is a bitter old bastard with a violent streak and a crazed son (a feral Norman Lloyd).

But the Tucker family, rounded out by son Jot, daughter Daisy, and Granny (an obstreperous Beulah Bondi), perseveres through any and all disaster, from Jot’s Spring Sickness to a storm that wipes out their crop. It is a movie about endurance and that peculiar brand of insanity called the American Dream, where people seek their fortunes in the face of calamity. For Renoir protagonists Sam and Nona are remarkably straightforward or true, neither touched by Boudu’s wanderlust but similarly attached to the idea of nature-as-freedom. Though in this case Sam is far from free – he is a tenant farmer, still working for a boss, however distant, and his responsibilities lie with his family whose health and happiness depends on the success of this mad enterprise. For it is entirely mad – the farmhouse is a wreck, and the family freezes in the winter and soaks during summer rains. The well is dry so Sam has to ask Devers for fresh water, and he is nursing a variety of wounds against the world, his wife and child having died while he was building up his plot of land. His is the nightmare side of the dream, gaining wealth while losing your life.

Renoir is very adept at blocking out scenes of group revelry, and there is a giddy wedding party sequence that acts as an oasis between emergencies, joining the entire town on bootleg liquor and dance. Sam gets clocked by one of his many disappointed suitors (he’s a one woman man) while Granny nearly lights the place on fire while making tea. Everyone laughs in a blissful state of forgetting. But then a storm hits, and it’s back to disaster management. Though this is mainly a film of static setups, Renoir does utilize his skill with moving camera early on, when the Tuckers first move into their dump. The camera breaks free of the family and enters the home, a free-floating Tucker POV that pokes its head in the door and peeks around corners. Absent of human presence, it presents the house as a blank slate that the Tuckers can fill with all their pain and laughter and failure and fleeting successes. The Southerner is one of Renoir’s most direct, most simple films, and certainly one of his most moving.

This is the tenth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

The French Revolution: La Marseillaise (1938)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney5 Comments

July 18, 2017

“It took me some time to understand that, for him, ideas had little meaning in themselves, and that all that mattered in his eyes was the personality of the individual expressing them.” – Alain Renoir on his father

La Marseillaise (1938) was made under intense political pressure, both from the censorious right and the Popular Front left, who partially funded this depiction of the French Revolution. Jean Renoir ended up making a film that pleased neither, depicting not the broad strokes of history but the idiosyncrasies of its individual actors. As Andre Bazin put it, Renoir “demythologizes history by restoring it to man.” It obscures the larger political movements but pauses for details like how the soldiers pad their boots or what Louis XVI thinks of tomatoes (he’s pro). After the supernova success of Grand Illusion (1937) Renoir had big plans to capture a larger panorama of the revolution, but kept whittling it down to a few engaging personalities, until we are left with a couple of hotheaded revolutionary Marseilles comrades and the aloofly charming Louis XVI (Pierre Renoir), who seems oblivious to the power shift happening right outside his doors. And yes, this marks the triumphant (?) return of my Jean Renoir series, which will run through August.

The film was proposed to and supported by the French Communist Party and the national trade union CGT (Confederation generale du travail), to be produced with Henri Jeanson. The original funding scheme was like a proto-Kickstarter, as posters and leaflets proclaimed that “for the first time, a film will be sponsored by the people themselves through a vast subscription drive.” Ambitious (and impossible) goals were set, like having teams of writers creating dialogue for different sections of the country. Jeanson and others would write for the Paris inner suburbs, while Marcel Pagnol was to write dialogues between Robespierre and Brissot. These never came to pass. Renoir and Jeanson would air their concept of the film in public meetings with Popular Front representatives, which were composed of “a hundred socialists, a hundred Communists, a hundred Radicals.” They all offered differing criticisms, one wanted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen read at the open, another was opposed to the title, while a third insisted upon a happy ending. Their suggestions were duly ignored.

They received 50,000 francs from the CGT, and 20,000 from the Union des syndicats, not nearly enough for a feature as sprawling as the one they were planning. So in the end, the feature was very traditionally funded by the production company Les Realisations d’art cinematographie (RAC), represented by Albert Pinkovitch, who had supported Grand Illusion. He pre-sold La Marseillaise for a million francs to various European and North African distributors, and Renoir received a guaranteed 400,000 francs. Jeanson considered this a betrayal, and held a grudge against Renoir for the rest of their natural lives. But it is highly unlikely they would have raised enough money through the CGT and other Popular Front groups to ever make the film.

It begins in the summer of 1789 as the King is informed of the storming of the Bastille. We see nothing of the dramatic event, only Pierre Renoir as Louis XVI, chowing down on his chicken and cheerily discussing the day’s hunt. In his appealing doofiness he recalls Hugh Laurie’s Wooster (from the BBC Jeeves and Wooster [1990-1993] adaptations). He is something of an imbecile, but is so unselfconscious it becomes charming. In 1790 Marseilles the townspeople start hearing about the storming of the Bastille and the formation of a revolutionary volunteer army. What passes for central characters are two of these villagers, the mason Bomier (Edmond Ardisson) and a toll clerk named Arnaud (Andrex). Bomier is hotheaded and impulsive, while Arnaud is the more calculating intellect, in touch with the shifting political alliances happening in Paris. Both sign up for the army and march to Paris, where they get into scrapes with some Royalists while reluctantly facing up to the fact that this will not be a bloodless war. For much of the film’s running time the revolution seems like a lark, a thrilling adventure for two poor kids, an excuse to travel the country. But during the storming of the Tuileries Palace blood starts to get shed, and the two men witness what it means to be collateral damage to your principles.

Renoir, though known for his brilliance with character, was also a master of screen space, and there are some remarkable battle sequences. You can see it in the first shot, guards twirling in diagonals across the screen, that Renoir can make soldiering look dynamic. The Tuileries sequence shifts on a dime from the thrill of comradeship, of the national guard joining the Marseilles volunteers, to the inhuman lineup of gun barrels positioned out of windows, as men are cut down like bags of flour dropping out of a delivery truck. It is striking how that switch registers, from the chaos of celebration, of embraces and chatter, to the rigid order of the war machine, with its perfect geometry and deadly logic. The Marseilles volunteers are pushed out, their loose band not having the same kind of brutal logic as the Swiss regiment holding out inside.

It is the Swiss who remain because the King had been spirited out. The King watches it all like a spectator, a man already outside of time. He is concerned about the angle of his wig and the taste of a tomato as the monarchy tumbles around him. Pierre Renoir plays him with such innocence and naiveté, that it’s hard to believe it’s an act. The King might just be a lovable foe, a tool of history rather than its driver. It is a film that leaves things unfinished – the King walks out of the Tuileries, his fate uncertain. He remarks upon the state of the leaves – they are falling more quickly this year. Arnaud and Bomier split up, Bomier nursing his wounds while Arnaud disappears into the fog of war. The film ends on a note of half-hearted triumph. The Tuileries has been won, but so much has been lost, and the war is just beginning.

This is the ninth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

Shore Leave: Querelle (1982)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 27, 2017

Rainer Werner Fassbinder passed away on the morning of June 10, 1982, three weeks into the editing of his final feature Querelle. The New York Times reported that, “a video-cassette machine that he had been using was still running at 5 A.M., Munich time, when Miss Lorenz [Julie Lorenz, his roommate and editor] discovered his body.” He died of an overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine – he had long been pushing his body to extremes while shooting some 45 features in 15 years. Querelle is not a summation or a final statement, as Fassbinder was constantly shifting, poking and exploring his stylistic palette. New paths emerged within every film, and Querelle is just another fork in the road before his heart gave out, but it is a feverishly beautiful one. Querelle is a free adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, about a dope-dealing seaman involved in a murder while on shore leave, while grappling with his repressed and newly emerging homosexual desires. Frankly erotic and garishly artificial, shot on horizonless soundstages and bathed in orange and blue filtered light, it is both ridiculous and sublime.

Fassbinder said that Genet’s novel transforms a “third-class tale about a criminal” into an “astonishing mythology.” And so while Fassbinder follows the the general movement of Genet’s plot, the declamatory performance style and minimalist sets draw attention away from the story and towards the iconography. These are Tom of Finland sailors, perpetually oiled up and shirtless, buffing anything near at hand, while hilariously phallic towers thrust upward around the docs of the port town of Brest. The highlight of Rolf Zehetbaur’s set design though, is the bordello, a dense Art Nouveau space of mirrors/curtains/Greek pornographic paintings. Fassbinder collaborator Harry Baer described the sets as “an artistically presented dream-fabric-reality,” comparing it to Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). It is in this slick atmosphere that Querelle (Brad Davis) floats into town, a sailor on a boat led by Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero), who harbors a secret crush for his employee. Querelle uses his job as a convenient way to smuggle dope to the local brothel, the Hotel Feria Bar, where he discovers his brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl) has been sleeping with the Feria’s owner Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau). Lysiane’s bartender husband Nono (Günther Kaufmann) doesn’t mind because he’s more interested in bedding young sailors. With each new patron of the bar he bets on a roll of the dice. If they lose he gets to have sex with them, if they win they can choose the prostitute of their choice.

After Querelle completes a drug sale, he cold-bloodedly murders his accomplice underneath a papier-mache moon. An investigation erupts and Querelle is a suspect, so he begins to deflect blame onto another criminal – Gil (also Hanno Pöschl, but sans moustache) – who killed a co-worker for accusing him of being gay. Querelle confusedly falls in love with Gil, who looks exactly like his brother Robert. Querelle claims, “I never loved a boy before. You’re the first one.” But Querelle is opaque, even to himself, and is only now allowing himself to indulge in his true lusts. His first homosexual experience was intentionally losing the dice game to Nono, who introduces him to the way in which sex can be used as a power game, and Querelle accepts it with masochistic pleasure. Querelle, whose whole life is some kind of con, quickly learns that seduction is its own tool, and learns how to play both sadist and masochist in order to advance his own interests. As Steven Shaviro notes in The Cinematic Body, “Fassbinder shows obvious contempt not only for…a ‘politically correct’ – which is to say, idealized and sanitized – depiction of sexuality. He refuses to provide ‘positive images’ of either straight or gay sex. On the contrary, he willfully aestheticizes the most troubling moments of his narrative, those when male sexuality is explicitly associated with power and domination, with violence, and with death.”

Querelle and Robert have a love-hate relationship that leans towards the latter, peaking during a spectacular fight sequence in which Fassbinder circles inside the bar in 360 degree pans as the two embark on their endless chase. With Gil, Querelle finds a Robert doppelganger, one he can love without reservation (the fact that he is a murderer, in Querelle’s eyes, only makes him more desirable). But when Querelle told Gil that he had never loved a boy before, that was another of his lies – he loves, and still loves, his brother. After convincing Gil to rob Lieutenant Seblon for escape money, Querelle forces him into a disguise. In a Vertigo-esque costume change, Gil dresses up as Robert, complete with fake moustache. This works on a double level, as it allows Querelle to seamlessly divert his emotions for Robert into Gil, as well as frame Robert for the robbery – for Gil looks more like Robert than himself. The Lieutenant will later identify Robert as the man who mugged him, leaving his fate unclear, as he is last seen drowning his sorrows with Lysiane, wishing that Querelle never existed.

It is an idea that would appeal to most of his friends, all of whom he betrays or backstabs to some extent or another. Only Lieutenant Seblon, who is unaware that Querelle ordered the heist of his suitcase, remains loyal to the end. Seblon records his thoughts on a tape recorder, a voice-over by other means, and fills it with thoughts and reflections on his overwhelming infatuation, one that is nearly debilitating in its intensity. In his presence his authority evaporates, becoming subject to Querelle’s ever-strengthening will to power.

Oh the Humanity: Dirigible (1931)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 20, 2017

Dirigible_(1931)

Summer movie season is already upon us, with superheroes saving the world from various varieties of destruction. I’m turning back the clock to 1931 to look at a disaster film that uses the same playbook, Frank Capra’s blimp inferno Dirigible (For the throngs of readers who have been following my Jean Renoir series, it is taking a month-long break, returning on July 18th). Dirigible‘s thrills are premised on scale, on framing the enormity of these cruising zeppelins against the sky, and realistically rendering the chaos of such a behemoth coming apart at the seams. This was a million dollar production, with a lot of effort at authenticity, and much of the flying footage was shot on real Navy blimps with the compact Eyemo camera (cinematographer Joseph A. Walker says only two insert shots – of a train station and a sealing ship – were stock). The movie alternates between these awe-inspiring feats of technological wonder and a rote love triangle that barely gets off the ground. This is a movie about the machines, not the people, which makes for dulling drama but stunning spectacle.

Dirigible is the second story credit for Commander Frank Wilbur Wead USN, a WWI veteran and aviation speed freak who advocated the Navy take part in races against Army planes. He would go on to serve as a test pilot before he broke his neck falling down a stairwell in 1926. It was then he turned to writing, becoming an in-demand scribe for air adventures large and small, from John Ford’s Air Mail (1932) and They Were Expendable (1945) to Howard Hawks’ Ceiling Zero (1936). Ford would memorialize Wead’s life in The Wings of Eagles (1957), where he was portrayed by John Wayne. But for Dirigible, Wead seems to have lifted some story elements from the 1929 independent film The Lost Zeppelin, which follows a journey to the South Pole shaken up by a love triangle.

Dirigible follows that story to the letter, except in this Columbia feature the woman (Fay Wray – two years before King Kong) stays home while the men go off and nearly kill themselves. Fay Wray plays Helen Pierce, the buzzkill wife of daredevil pilot Lt. Frisky Pierce (Ralph Graves). Helen had previously been wooed by the more straitlaced Commander Jack Bradon (Jack Holt), but in the end she chose Frisky. Frisky and Jack remain friends somehow, and Jack’s picture remains on Helen’s mantel. In previous drafts one imagines an open relationship was implied (Lubitsch’s Design For Living would base a whole movie on that subject in 1933), but here everything is prim and above board, assuredly to appease the Navy, who cooperated with the production and let them shoot on their massive dirigible Los Angeles.

The Navy partners with explorer Louis Rondelle (Hobart Bosworth) on a journey to the South Pole, and Jack convinces them both that blimps are the safest way to get there. Helen begs Jack not to take Frisky along on the dangerous mission, and Jack agrees, which breaks Frisky’s adventurous heart.Midway through their trip the explorers plow through a vicious storm which tears the blimp in half as if it were papier-mâché. Through judicious miniature work matching the aerial footage, the crash is harrowing stuff. For the aftermath, in which the hulk of the blimp heaves out of ocean water like an alien monolith, Capra shoots in soft focus with an extra layer of matted-on fog. It looks like an etching or woodcut, disaster brought to its elemental basics. While that sequence is artful, almost impressionistic, the majority of the film is after authenticity. Capra was obsessed with the idea of the actors breath being visible on film during the South Pole expedition, even though they had assembled the Antarctic ice cap in the San Gabriel Valley where the temperature was pushing 90 degrees. So Capra went to his pal Professor Lucas at Caltech. “Dry ice, Frank. In the actors’ mouths. That’ll make the breath condense. Put a piece of dry ice in a tiny wire cage.”

Capra went along with this scheme and had his dentist create little wire cages, which he would stick to the roof of your mouth with false-teeth glue. Capra recalls the results:

“Hobert Bosworth, a noble actor of the old, old school, unfurled the grand old flag, stuck it in the ice, and eloquently announced: ‘In the shname of the Shnooni — Stoonited–“.” He stopped, pulled out the wire cage, and “plopped the square piece of dry ice into his mouth as he would a big pill.” Bosworth would lose three back teeth, two uppers, part of his jawbone, and much dead tissue.” No other actor tried the stunt, and the breath isn’t visible in the finished film, though they do smoke a lot.

Obsessed with the journey he missed out on, Frisky quits the Navy and raises private money to do the trip with Rondelle. This time they will use his trusty biplane to putter their way to the bottom of the Earth. Helen is dyspeptic about this latest scheme, convinced Frisky just wants to get away from her, their life, and his responsibilities at home. She looks longingly at the portrait of Jack, of the stable, boring life they might have had together. So she writes Frisky a Dear John letter, but makes him promise not to reach it until he reaches the South Pole. Helen is a thankless character, the woman-as-killjoy reigning in man’s self-destructive tendencies. And the 23-year-old Fay Wray can do little to enliven a character whose main role is to sit at home and nitpick her husband, but for the split-second she writes this letter, she gains a personality.

But of course Frisky carries on anyway, and this second journey is far more successful, getting them to glide right over the pole. But it’s not enough for Frisky who wants to set foot on that virgin land, but his attempt to land the plane flips it over, stranding them in the true middle of nowhere. The only thing that can save him and their stranded crew is the new supersize blimp, the Los Angeles, which has to motor down to the pole and hope the crew hadn’t frozen to death in the process. The only one who can save them, of course, is Jack in his new supersized blimp, the Los Angeles. So he motors down apace, trying to get there before they all die of exposure. These final sequences in the snow remind one of any number of survivalist mountain climbing movies, including the recent Everest (2015), where the hubris of their cocky leader brings about their own demise.

Dirigible is a durable construction, that, if it was in color and starred Pierce Brosnan, would air with the same regularity as Dante’s Peak (1997). The actors don’t have much to work with, but the effects, in this case real life navy dirigibles, are the stars of the show. And DP Joseph A. Walker and his daredevil cameraman Elmer G. Dyer make them larger than life when in the sky, and as fragile flesh when tumbling to the ground.

Jean Renoir: La Bete Humaine (1938)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney6 Comments

June 13, 2017

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Following the transformative success of Grand Illusion (1937), Jean Renoir suddenly had an overwhelming number of opportunities. There was an offer on the table from Samuel Goldwyn to come to Hollywood, though he delayed his route there, at least temporarily. Instead he would direct the panoramic French Revolution drama La Marseillaise (which I will write about later in my Renoir series) and our subject today, La Bête Humaine. The latter is a moody death-haunted drama adapted from the Emile Zola novel, returning to the author’s work for the first time since Nana (1926). A grimly fatalistic tale about a train engineer’s inbred compulsion to murder, and his desperate attempts to restrain it, it is graced by an iconic Jean Gabin performance that attempts to go beyond good and evil.

Though Renoir was in a position of much greater power, La Bête Humaine was another project he came onto late, after it had been developed and dropped by numerous other artists. As detailed by Pascal Merigeau in Jean Renoir: A Biography, the film had begun its life with director Marc Allégret and writer Roger Martin du Gard in 1933. Producer Philippe de Rothschild sold the screenplay to Marcel L’Herbier, who was also unable to get it off the ground. On a separate track, Jean Gabin had agreed to star in a project called Train d’enfer, as it was a long-held dream of his to drive a locomotive. Jean Gremillon and Marcel Carné successively passed on directing it, and in leaving Carné suggested that if Gabin wanted to be a train engineer, producers Robert and Raymond Hakim should just film Zola’s La Bête Humaine. In acquiring the rights they gained access to Martin du Gard’s script (he had since become much more famous since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature), which Renoir trashed upon taking over production. He wrote his script in a self-reported twelve days. Martin Du Gard moved Zola’s time period from 1869 to 1914, but Renoir’s version brought it up to contemporary times, thinking that, “such action taking place amidst trains standing on wheels high above the ground and around wooden rail cars would have lost some of its dramatic intensity….Also, because the France of today isn’t that of Napoleon III, because of the way it is now, its qualities as well as its flaws, I believe it deserves to be defended through and through by its children.”

The screaming futurism of the coal-belching iron train is integral to Renoir’s vision of the original text, which at various points he has claimed to have never read all the way through. He was probably joking, but in any case the film version places the central character, Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) in the train engineer’s cab, his face blasted with soot as he sticks his head out the window like a panting dog. Lantier has a history of depressive, violent episodes, which he ascribes to inherited guilt from his alcoholic ancestors. As the Zola quote at the head of the film says, “He felt he was paying the price for the generations of his forefathers whose drinking had poisoned his blood.” He can’t drink a drop himself, but still enters violent fugue states which he cannot control. And so he has segregated himself from society, choosing to live alone, preferring to engage with the world as a blur outside his train window.

But then he gets entangled in the affairs of Severine (Simone Simon), an unhappy young wife to stationmaster Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux). Severine has a tangled past of her own, and when Roubaud discovers it he enters a murderous rage, killing Severine’s godfather on a moving train. Lantier was on that same train car when the murder took place, and saw Severine exit the cabin at the time of the crime. Entranced by her wounded catlike beauty, he lies to the police and hides her secret. He falls in love with her, and she with him, though both are drawn to self-destructive acts. Severine becomes convinced that the only way out of her predicament is for Lantier to kill Roubaud, and then they can escape together…somewhere. But murder only begets murder, and Severine and Lantier set loose their demons on each other until the only escape is death.

Lantier is a devilishly difficult character to portray, a victim of fate and genetics who still, in the end, commits heinous acts. He is something of a monster, and yet Gabin’s sensitive, wounded, and defeated performance imbues him with what amounts to a soul. He shows a man who fought against and instincts and lost, now playing out the string until he does himself in for good. He is soft-spoken, almost mumbly, his words receding as soon as he says them. It is a proto-Brando performance, and turns makes Lantier a sympathetic monster instead of a pathetic one. Simone Simon has less to work with, her character is more of a means to an unfortunate end -but exudes a wounded, capricious spirit.

In a film of great performances, one sequence stands out. It is Renoir himself playing the character of Cabuche, drifter and former childhood friend of Severine. He is the one unjustly fingered for the murder on the train, for some uncouth comments he made afterward. He is brought in for questioning, and this rather brusque fellow, who killed a man in prison, launches into a nostalgic reverie about picking strawberries in the summer, looking for chestnuts in the fall, walking through the forest hand in hand with this girl who was nice to him when he was otherwise shunned. His soot-covered face softens, his head bowed with the weight of his memories. It is one of those diversionary Renoir moments when the entire life of a minor character blooms forth, overspilling with love and admiration. It is this kind of love that Lantier and Severine don’t seem to be capable of, weighed down as they are by their mutual maladies and disgust with the lives they have been given. Oftentimes I would wish the film would wander off more like that Cabuche monologue, pull itself free of the ever-constricting doom enveloping Lantier and Severine. But those two star-crossed lovers free themselves in their own way, the only way they know how.

This is the eighth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The previous entries:

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

Jean Renoir: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney7 Comments

June 6, 2017

lange

Jean Renoir considered The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) to be a turning point in his career, a film that opened “the door to some projects that are more completely personal.” He would go on to make A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths immediately after (I have written about both in previous weeks), on which he had significantly more control. Lange was originally proposed and conceived by Jacques Becker, and its script was later revised by Jacques Prevert. Renoir invited Prevert on set to collaborate in its production. The film is a provocative blend of performance styles, with the radical Popular Front aligned October Group (Florelle, Maurice Baquet Sylvie Bataille, Jacques-Bernard Brunius) meeting the old-fashioned theatrical boulevardiers, the latter exemplified by Jules Berry’s craven, charismatic depiction of the womanizer Batala, owner and operator of a struggling publishing house. His incompetence and greed take advantage of mild-mannered Western writer Lange (René Lefèvre) until Batala disappears and the company is run cooperatively by its employees. It is a both a joyous vision of a worker-run business and finely tuned character study of what could drive a man to murder.

In 1935 Jacques Becker, one of Renoir’s assistant directors, and Spanish painter Jean Castanier wrote a screenplay for what was then called Sur la cour (On the Yard). They offered it to producer André Halley des Fontaine, who was, per Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography, the “wealthy heir of a family of steelwork owners”. Becker had previously convinced Halley des Fontaine to fund his medium-length debut Pitiless Gendarme and its follow-up Une tête qui rapporte (both 1935). But Halley des Fontaines did not trust Becker enough with the larger investment required by a feature, and so instead turned to Renoir. Becker was furious, for as Merigeau reports it was heavily rumored that Renoir, “learning about what was happening with the screenplay…muscled in on the deal and obviously met with no reluctance on the part of the producer.” Renoir had been in the business for ten years without a real box office success, and was taking work where he could get it, even if it was at the expense of his friends. Becker and Renoir would reconcile a few months after their break, and Becker would work as his assistant director through La Marseillaise in 1938.

Renoir brought Jean Castanier on to write a revised treatment for the film, which they worked on in April of 1935. In this early version the framing sequences were set in a courtroom, not the border hotel it would be shot as. Part of the reason for his eagerness to take on the project might have been its treatment of a cooperative. In his book on his father, the painter Auguste Renoir, he recounts an event was Auguste was seventeen and working at a porcelain factory. Their boss was thinking of selling the business, and was “proposing to create a cooperative. They would pay the boss for rental of the premises with their profits. The workers would share the remainder in equal parts. The idea was to take swift action against the machines that were coming to steal their bread and butter.”

In the film Batalan’s already teetering publishing company is faced with a quandary when Batalon is reported dead. With the help of a loopy creditor’s son and Batalan’s sole surviving heir, an agreement is made to run the company cooperatively, with decisions made jointly by the employees. Lange had sold the rights to his increasingly popular “Arizona Jim” character to Batalan, but is able to share in the profits with his boss’ passing. In the little courtyard outside the office, many more intrigues play out, including laundress Valentine’s (Florelle) single-minded romantic pursuit of the oblivious Lange, a star-crossed affair between another laundry maid Estelle (Nadia Sibirskaia) and Charles (Maurice Baquet), the son of the building’s frequently soused concierge (Marcel Levesque, a favored actor of Sacha Guitry). The movie crackles with life and incident, every nook and cranny of this little courtyard an opportunity for storytelling, and Renoir and his DP Jean Bachelet keep the camera moving to catch each development. This peaks in the final sequence with a brilliantly staged 360 degree pan that encompasses every floor of the office building and the entirety of the courtyard, ending in the fateful crime of the title.

The meeting of Renoir and Jacques Prévert was fortuitous, as both were headed in opposite directions politically. Prévert had become disillusioned with the progress of Russian Communism after a recent visit, while Renoir was still enthralled with its possibilities. Prévert was likely directed to the project by Castanier, a fellow member of the October Group, a leftist theatrical troupe which mounted productions at trade union meetings, workers’ halls, and the open air. Renoir recalled his contributions to the film in 1957: “We worked together. I asked him to come to the set with me. He was there every day, which was very kind of him; and I would say to him constantly: ‘Well, pal, that’s where we have to improvise,’ and the film was improvised like all my others, but with Prévert’s constant cooperation.”

Merigeau writes that Renoir exaggerates both the extent of Prévert’s presence on the set and the amount of improvisation (the film sticks very close to the shooting script). But much of the energy of the film is generated by the generational clash in performance styles. Jules Berry is a phenomenal ham as Batalan, playing to the balcony with his operatic patter and balletic seduction techniques. Sylvia Bataille recalled that Berry told her, “‘You know, Renoir wants him [Batalan] to be cynical, but I’m going to lighten him up and give him some smiles.’ And the more he made him smile, the more cynical the character became.” Batalan is heartless and irresistible, contemptible and magnetic, depicting both the charms and snares of capitalism. Though in Renoir’s films the people are never reduced to symbols, they are far too charming for that.

It is when Berry plays off of Florelle, a whip-smart Joan Blondell type who was part of the October Group, that the movie takes on dimensions of generational exchange or frisson. Berry is grandiloquent where Florelle is rawer and more realist – their exchanges crackle with curdled flirtation. When the cooperative takes over these gendered workplace battles no longer take place, instead it’s a cacophony of voices, disordered but joyous. It is at peak euphony during an office party when the titular crime takes place, where Lange makes a principled decision to take a life. It is understandable theoretically, almost necessary to maintain the communal life so beautifully rendered by the rowdy cast, but Renoir also lingers on the life draining from the victim’s face. For every act, there is a cost. Lange pays his, and escapes over the horizon.

This is the seventh part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The previous entries:

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)