Word: renoirs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have seen only one film I enjoyed as much as Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M. Lange, and that was Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, Renoir, at his best, directs with a masterful command of camera, acting, plot, dialogue, in short, all the cinematic virtues. At his worst, he may produce a Picnic on the Grass, but this rather insipid fete champetre should not keep anyone from seeing such a complex and powerful masterpiece as Le Crime...
Although Jacques Prevert's script unfolds the details of a murder, it is very unlike a conventional whodunit. The title of the film assigns guilt, the crime itself does not occur until very near the end, and Lange confesses to the first man he sees. Renoir spends the bulk of his time painting a genre scene of one small area in the Paris printing district. Life flows hectically between the publishing house of Batala and the streets. Renoir's photography seems to tear away the facades of buildings and to make the entire fauborg one stage. A fine example...
...screen dramatist, Renoir has few equals. He builds up the character of Batala, the malevolent publisher, through a series of short scenes in his private office. Salesmen, creditors and laundresses come in and out on various errands. Batala mulcts the men and seduces the women again and again with a kind of oily facility that amuses at first but disgusts in the end. The laundresses really began to bother me about the third time around. Day after day (which amounts to every ten minutes in the film) they bring him his shirts. The implication is that he changes his linen...
...Though Renoir avoids the usual murder mystery pattern, he manages to create quite a shock when he brings back Batala from the dead. I won't give away the crucial sequence, but it would be very simple to figure the whole thing out if Renoir did not use a love scene to draw attention away from a radio broadcast...
Accent (CBS, 5-5:30 p.m.). French Motion Picture Director Jean Renoir takes viewers to Paris' Jeu de Paume, discusses the impressionist canvases of his father as well as Cézanne, Van Gogh...