Director: Jean Renoir
Year: 1939
Run-time: 1 hr 50 min
- This is Renoir's grand opus, his most famous film, at least after it came back into favor after the war (it was a notorious flop upon release). If I was forced to choose, I might call it my favorite film of the 1930's. But it's not very representative of that era, not fitting neatly into any particular movement. Renoir was as much a pioneer of poetic realism as Carne, but with this one he consciously rejected the style and tried to make something that was, to paraphrase the man himself, more Voltaire than Flaubert. But in confronting class hierarchy directly, he created something that felt more honest than anything he had made before, while being at the same time breathtaking and often bitingly funny.
- Class conflict was a preoccupation of Renoir's previous films going back at least as far as Boudu Saved From Drowning, but many other of Renoir's themes can be found here as well, including the relationship between man and nature, as epitomized by the many shots of rabbits being shot in the hunt (echoing, of course, the final scene).
- Renoir was not the first, and certainly wasn't the last director to appear in his own films, but his character here is the heart of the movie, and a case can be made that he's even the best actor in this thing, taking notes from Michel Simon in Boudu but humanizing that character a great deal.
Year: 1939
Run-time: 1 hr 50 min
- This is Renoir's grand opus, his most famous film, at least after it came back into favor after the war (it was a notorious flop upon release). If I was forced to choose, I might call it my favorite film of the 1930's. But it's not very representative of that era, not fitting neatly into any particular movement. Renoir was as much a pioneer of poetic realism as Carne, but with this one he consciously rejected the style and tried to make something that was, to paraphrase the man himself, more Voltaire than Flaubert. But in confronting class hierarchy directly, he created something that felt more honest than anything he had made before, while being at the same time breathtaking and often bitingly funny.
- Class conflict was a preoccupation of Renoir's previous films going back at least as far as Boudu Saved From Drowning, but many other of Renoir's themes can be found here as well, including the relationship between man and nature, as epitomized by the many shots of rabbits being shot in the hunt (echoing, of course, the final scene).
- Renoir was not the first, and certainly wasn't the last director to appear in his own films, but his character here is the heart of the movie, and a case can be made that he's even the best actor in this thing, taking notes from Michel Simon in Boudu but humanizing that character a great deal.
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