Director: Jean Renoir
Often called the masterpiece of director Jean Renoir’s post-war period, The River is a film of tremendous empathy, full of wisdom and a gentleness the recalls a great adolescent novel. It is also erred by the failing performances, which tend to range from passable to bad–the picture has seductive rhythms, but on a scene-by-scene basis, much of the drama that plays out falls flat. Most problematic is Thomas E. Breen as Captain John, which is the crucial role in that should enhance our understanding of the three women who vie for his affection. As the forgotten man archetype–he recently lost a leg in what we understand to be World War II–Breen shows a convincing awkwardness and excitability regarding the attention he gets, but doesn’t carry the weight of his own burdens. At the end of the film, he tells Harriet (Patricia Walters) that as humans we are met with situations that will either kill us a little bit or spur a rebirth. It’s a touching moment of compassion, one of many that one wishes were delivered by a more complete actor. Regardless, Renoir’s vision of India was radical for the time (albeit still problematized by colonialist nostalgia) in that instead of suggesting a pronounced danger in the exotic, he embraces the Hindu religion by incorporating themes of renewal and rebirth, envisioning the Ganges River as a metaphor for the steady, insuppressible flow of life. Claude Renoir’s cinematography revels in the murky waters and clay bricks of the setting as much as he romanticizes traditional Indian celebrations–it is a remarkable visual achievement, showing a dynamism in its vision and serving as a counterpoint to Black Narcissus’ beautiful artifice.
Director: Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir’s Hollywood swan song (and, along with The Southerner, his most impressive American film) was so butchered by reshoots following a poor test screening that the French director largely denounced the work. And yet, for all of its inconsistencies, it has the unique feel of a fever dream; a logic all of its own. After all, this is a film driven very much by madness–it is in the very first scene that the lieutenant played by Robert Ryan suffers from a nightmare and then confesses that his near death experience rendered him mentally unstable. The intensity of Ryan’s distrust with the blind painter (wonderfully played by Charles Bickford) is hardly driven by any logical sense. Bickford is cruel, but his cruelest moments occur beyond closed doors. It is Ryan’s questionable motivations in “exposing” his sexual adversary that makes the picture such a potent examination of perversion and desire. Furthermore, Renoir’s visual stylizations are as memorable as any noir–more desolate and dreamlike than macabre, with striking images such as a man on horseback strolling down a beach seeming to exist outside of time.
Director: Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was never a great fit for Hollywood – in France, he essentially worked independently of studios, whereas the moguls of Hollywood didn’t have the patience to allow him the level of control that he needed to be satisfied. Of the five features that he made in America, Renoir later said in interviews that The Southerner was the only picture that he was happy with. Adapted from George Sessions Perry’s novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, the film concerns a tenement farmer forced to brave the uncooperative elements in order to provide for his family. Joel McCrea was originally pegged for the lead, but the role went to a cast-against-type Zachary Scott. Although he typically played smarmy, affluent types, Scott’s own upbringing better mirrored the character, and to the patriarch he brings a tremendous level of sympathy and a persistent heroism. Whereas agrarian locales often serve as the purest and most idyllic of landscapes in many American pictures, Renoir captures the grind of the fields, as well as the rot of the almost beyond repair shack that the family must call home. As grueling as farm life is depicted, however, and how devastating it is when it is all destroyed by a particularly violent storm, Renoir ends with a transcendent, optimistic note, suggesting the importance of community in the aftermath of a trauma. Released in 1945, one would be hard-pressed to find a more poetic appeal towards post-war Americans.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1946, jean renoir, the diary of a chambermaid
Director: Jean Renoir
Often overshadowed by Luis Buñuel’s later, sexier adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Diary of a Chambermaid, Jean Renoir’s interpretation was his penultimate Hollywood film, and it perhaps most closely resembles the themes that he addressed in his French work. Former Mrs. Charlie Chaplin Paulette Goddard plays Celestine, a young chambermaid who takes up her new post at the estate of the Lanlaire family. The matriarch of the household, Mrs. Lanlaire, exerts total control over both the servants of the mansion and her own husband, and through Celestine’s charms she wishes to seduce the son who ran away from her into staying at home once again. While the perversity of Buñuel’s version was closer to the novel – which was highly erotic on the page – Renoir choses to focus on the relationships between employers and servants in the generation following the French Revolution. Mrs. Lanlaire represents a product of the pre-Republic era – with the mass of silver she possesses suggesting that she holds onto the status that her family once held – and, in the film’s climax, Celestine redistributes the Lanlaire’s riches with the lowly townsfolk in an act of revolutionary socialism. The picture is wholly unique, with shifting tones and inventive juxtapositions – a murder taking place concurrently with an independence celebration, for example – and, while not often cited among Renoir’s best work, it is a fitting companion piece to The Rules of the Game.
Director: Jean Renoir
When Germany invaded France in 1940, Jean Renoir fled to the United States and worked in Hollywood for several years. The second of the American pictures that he directed was This Land Is Mine, a heartfelt propaganda piece about the importance of revolutions and the personal sacrifices that one needs to make in order to better the world for future generations. Set in an unnamed Nazi-occupied country (clearly meant to suggest France), the incomparable Charles Laughton plays a timid school teacher who finds the will to fight alongside the Resistance. The cast is uniformly excellent – Maureen O’Hara plays the love interest (who also starred with Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and George Sanders brings the smugness that one would expect from him, but also convincing shades of weakness. This is Laughton’s picture, though, who is surely among the finest that there’s ever been. Few have measured up to the vulnerability and tenderness that he could bring to the screen (I would argue that his Quasimodo is the best performance of that era). While the rousing courtroom speeches at the end of the picture feel excessive today, when one considers the historical context it must have been an appropriately uplifting call-to-arms.
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