Sur un air de Charleston (1927)

Sur un air de Charleston is a French science-fiction film first released in 1927, directed by Jean Renoir.  The film stars Catherine Hessling, Johnny Hudgins, Pierre Braunberger, André Cerf and Pierre Lestringuez.  It has also been released under the title: Charleston.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


A black-faced space traveller arrives on Earth to find the planet in ruins after an apocalyptic disaster.  He discovers a wild young woman who lives in a shack with a monkey.  The alien is impressed when the wild woman teaches him various dances, and decides to take her away with him in his spaceship...

With some material left over from his previous film, Nana , Jean Renoir decided to indulge his whim for comic fantasy in this bizarre short film which defies any attempt at rational interpretation.  The film was intended as a surreal tribute to jazz, which Renoir claimed to have just discovered when he made the film.  With a blacked-up lead character and clumsy erotic dances from a semi-nude Catherine Hessling, the film manages to push back the frontier of bad taste by several leagues, but Renoir’s humanist treatment of his subject – to say nothing of his bizarre imagination – makes the film an interesting and oddly entertaining curiosity.

© James Travers 2003

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Johnny Hudgins was a dear friend of mine before he passed away. He and his wife Mildred Hudgins gave me two of his scrapbooks. In one of them, I have the original photos taken during the filming of Charleston. By the way, Catherine Hessling, the female star, was Jean Renoir’s wife at the time. Johnny Hudgins, who liked to be called a colored pantomime, is unfortunately a forgotten giant of vaudeville.
Jean-Claude Baker (New York City, USA)

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