An absolutely amazing piece of sociological science fiction, Jean Renoir’s silent dance musical “Sur un air de Charleston” is twenty minutes of hilarious, zany satire. It is also a bold statement that contradicts the position that photography and theater are the principal art forms in which cinema finds its roots. Renoir casts his compelling vote […]
Tag Archives: Renoir/Grunes
From Georges Simenon, writer-director Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads is a dark, humorous, fog-enshrouded mystery in a remote suburban patch of near-nothingness, consisting of three houses and a garage, outside Paris. Pierre Renoir, the filmmaker’s brother, wittily plays Inspector Maigret, who is investigating the murder of “the Jew,” perhaps by “the Dane”: victim and […]
By common critical procedure, Jean Renoir’s late-career Le caporal épinglé, because it is about two French soldiers who keep trying to escape a wartime German prison-camp, is complacently clubbed by comparison with Renoir’s La grande illusion a quarter-century earlier. In a sense, Renoir is inviting—daring—the comparison. From Jacques Perret’s 1947 autobiographical novel, Le caporal épinglé […]
Martin Scorsese deems Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, about the French Revolution in its early phase, “one of the finest and richest historical films ever made.” It provides views of the unfolding events by both common folk and royals; the system in place thinks so little of an ordinary man’s life that if he should kill […]
Shortly after completing “La petite marchande d’allumettes,” based on the tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Renoir and Catherine Hessling divorced, making it the last film where Renoir directed Hessling. Here, the usually deficient Hessling charms, the whole film enchants, and Renoir achieves poignancy that is wedded to incomparable visual beauty. Karen, who is starving, […]
Dennis Grunes 
