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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine overview of Renoir's career, 7 Nov 2007
Unlike LionsGate's Region 1 Renoir boxed set, this doesn't include Renoir's first two silent features (La femme de L'eau and Nana), but offers a fine overview of the director's established classics and some less well remembered films from the beginning and end of his career.
Made with film stock left over from the production of Nana, 1927's Sur un Air de Charleston is described as a holiday film for all concerned, and that's the best way to view it. Jean Renoir seems never to have thought enough of it to even edit the footage together. The plot is a simple reversion of racial stereotypes - in 2028 a black explorer travels to a post-holocaust Paris where a white native girl teaches him the Charleston (naturally he assumes she's a savage whose dancing is a prelude to her eating him before giving in to the seductive beat of `White Aborigine' music). There are plenty of surreal touches, be it the pet gorilla eating the flowers in Catherine Hessling's hair, the angels the girl telephones (Renoir and producer Pierre Braunberger among them) or the fact that black performer Johnny Huggins plays his part in minstrel blackface while Hessling's dancing ability is almost completely nonexistent, and there are some interesting occasional experiments with slow motion, but there's not really enough to sustain it for its modest two reels. An additional air of surrealism is provided by the fact that this silent musical has absolutely no score at all on Lions Gate's new DVD...
1928 short La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes aka The Little Match Girl also suffers from an unconvincing and badly cast lead performance from Mrs Renoir, Catherine Hessling, who looks anything but little and more than capable of looking after herself, which certainly takes the edge off Hans Christian Andersen's tale. Indeed, the film makes a couple of attempts to write itself out of the problem by portraying her as more than usually stupid, but they feel more like in-jokes than anything else. It's a shame, because the film itself is an impressively staged fantasy with great special effects and some interesting visual experimentation with camera speed and focus amid the unashamedly romantic treatment of the fantasy scenes, especially the sequence where the girl and her toy soldier are chased through the clouds by Death in the form of a relentless Hussar. If only you could care about the character. Lions Gate's transfer is rather more worn than their other Renoir titles, being mastered from a 1959 reissue with a good synchronized soundtrack.
La Marseillaise is a people's epic, and not just because it was initially backed by public subscription before budget overruns necessitated a more conventional form of funding. Even its credits proudly boast its association with France's short-lived Popular Front, while the picture is as much a celebration of the everyman's role in the great events of history as it is rabble-rousing propaganda for the impending war with Germany. Unfortunately it gets off to a surprisingly bad start. Indeed, the first twenty minutes are so poor you wonder if the film can ever recover. A stilted historical pageant in the very worst sense, with awkward editing, speech-making, initially clumsy characterization and a crude jumps forward in time, it's unpromising stuff.
It's only with the taking of the fort that Renoir really finds his feet as one character notes that sunsets are only glorious in novels - anyone who has to get up that early for work knows that they're usually cold, damp and grey. And with that comes Renoir's real manifesto for the film: he's less interested in the confused politics of France's messy revolution than he is in the people caught up in it, and from this point on it becomes a celebration of the ordinary people whose names have been forgotten in the great events. Aside from the King (a fine turn from Pierre Renoir, the director's brother) and his court, we never see any of the great names of the Revolution. Renoir's constantly roving camera is just as likely to settle on a pair of children playing in the street than the thousands of extras around them waiting for battle to be joined, while the political satire of a shadow play is far less important to him than a soldier taking his girl out for a night at the pictures. The cinematography is often stunning, picking up small details and filling the frame at the same time with a fluidity few Hollywood pictures of the time could match.
It's also very astute on the way an army - particularly a people's army of volunteers - marches on rumor and contradictions, yet never reduces the volunteers to figures of easy ridicule. Even the royalists are allowed some intelligence and a genuine love of France, even if they are fatally undermined by the ease with which they are sidetracked from politics to trivia: after pointing out the perils of the disastrous Brunswick Manifesto, the King ends up waving it through when he insults his wife's relatives an has to smooth things over. But then, everybody has their reasons.
It's not a great film, but it is a surprisingly entertaining one once it gets going and the camerawork is often stunning, with Renoir demonstrating such a mastery of the epic form that it's a pity he never returned to the genre. Also included is a documentary on the making of the film.
La Bete Humaine is my favorite Renoir and one which tends to divide many of his critics and admirers. For me it's an exhilarating and involving piece of cinema with characters destroyed by and destroying themselves in events in much more credible circumstances than in Regle du Jeu, which gives it some real emotional and thematic weight beyond mere parlor games - not to mention having the thrill of seeing post WW1 French doomed romanticism evolving into proto-film noir before your very eyes. These characters truly do all have their reasons and find their attempts to control events and other people backfiring spectacularly as they lose control in a way that none of the mannequins in Regle do. But it's all subjective. Jean Gabin is superb, the use of locations exemplary and Simone Simon was a babe, even if she does try to bite!
La Grande Illusion is one of those films whose reputation as one of the pinnacles of cinematic achievement has always seemed unfathomable to me. If anything, its reputation does the film a great disservice. It IS a good film - a very good film, in fact - but it's not a particularly great one, and it seems to have less to say with each passing year, gradually turning into yet another prisoner of war movie moving from boarding school hijinks to superficial comments on the class system. There are a few excellent scenes in the last third, not least once Von Stroheim re-enters the film, but it feels at times as if there's more French studio system craft than substance. Certainly as an anti-war film it's surprisingly ineffective compared to Pabst or Milestone's earlier efforts. An improvement over the previous Warners/Canal + release, this has a restored sequence missing from the earlier release and an introduction by film historian Ginette Vincendreau.
Le Testament Du Docteur Cordelier is dismissed by many as a mere TV movie (it even begins with Renoir discussing the film in a television studio: around this time he regularly filmed introductions for TV broadcasts of his films), but despite being visually a little flat due to being shot quickly with multiple cameras both to save time and money and to allow the actors more freedom, it's an intriguing attempt to remove the overfamiliarity which curses all other adaptations of its source material. It would be giving too much away to mention exactly which extremely famous novel it's based on (it's not even credited in the main titles), but despite being moved from Victorian Edinburgh to 50s Paris it's in many ways the most faithful screen adaptation to the original mystery structure of the novel. Of course, once you know the title any mystery is gone, so in a strange way changing the names, updating and relocating it is the only way to even attempt to preserve any element of surprise.
Some elements are more successful than others, and while it retains the all-important but oft overlooked front door/back door geography of the good Doctor's house, it's somewhat diminished by both entrances opening on respectable streets rather than occupying the borderline between the upper class streets and the slums. However, it is the only version that points out that far from being the victim of his good intentions, the doctor in question is in fact merely covering up his own very willing part in the crimes rather than trying to put an end to them: his only reason for wanting to end them is to end the pain that HE suffers rather than the pain that is inflicted on others. But the real triumph of the film is Jean-Louis Barrault's performance as Opale, a quite remarkable display of pure physicality offering a mass of twitches, swagger and curious movements that should skirt on the comic yet somehow combine with the character's arbitrary rage and purely opportunistic violence to create a disturbing portrait of malice that's a world away from the hypocritical and ultimately far more monstrous Dr Cordelier's public displays of rigid self-control. It may be a minor film, particularly in Renoir's canon, but it's a major performance that deserves to be much better known. Also included is the film's trailer.
Jean-Pierre Cassel is Le Caporal Épinglé aka The Vanishing Corporal/The Elusive Corporal, a serial escaper determined to get back to Paris when it becomes clear that the Germans have no intention of releasing their French prisoners of war after they have occupied France. A Franco-German co-production (which explains O.E...
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