Word: renoirs
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...list of all-time greats, this World War I saga prefigures many a Great Escape prison-camp movie--it pits a German commandant (Erich von Stroheim) against two captured French officers (Pierre Fresnay and Jean Gabin) in a gradually warming debate on the codes of honor and survival. But Renoir the humanist is no sentimentalist, as the film's French title makes clear: La Grande Illusion translates as The Big Illusion. This was the first Criterion DVD release, and the supplements show that the company was on its game from the start. There is Renoir's filmed reminiscence...
...Russian play imported to Japan, with its dark humor and dour humanity intact--indeed, italicized? That's what Akira Kurosawa managed in 1957 with his faithful film of Maxim Gorky's claustrophobic epic. The Criterion edition offers a bonus: Jean Renoir's '36 version, with Jean Gabin in the role of the charismatic thief played in the Kurosawa film by Toshiro Mifune. It's a chance to see two movie masters stamp their genius on a superb drama...
...BêTE HUMAINE JEAN RENOIR Many years later, Renoir described this streamlined 1938 version of the Zola novel as a love triangle about a man, a woman and a locomotive. That sells short the sullen passion that binds sooty engineer Jean Gabin to kittenish femme fatale Simone Simon. An implacable film noir before noir was cool, this is atypical but essential Renoir, and a reminder that subtitles are no hindrance when a great director paints in the visual language of film...
Mazursky varies Renoir's ending, refusing to permit his tramp to rediscover the freedom of the open road; the director seems uncertain about who finally benefits most from this strange encounter. Indeed, the old film that Down and Out most consistently evokes is Mazursky's own Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, also a nervously ambiguous but hilariously etched caricature of the bourgeois at self-improving play. In his desire to back away pleasantly from some of his tale's more critical implications, he relies too much on reaction shots of Matisse for easy, innocent laughs. Well, Disney did produce the film...
...Butler Yeats, then staying at the attorney's (would you believe?) 30-room Manhattan apartment. Jack has sticky fingers; he usually lightens the cash envelope, and when his boss dies, Morrison and his sister-in-law steal a Yeats manuscript from the apartment, bypassing a stack of paintings by Renoir. Says Emily Morrison: "Anything Irish got to be better." Her son Jimmy has no such flair for literary appreciation. He finds easier pickings as a corrupt union officer, and fathers Owney...