Film Review
The French film director who responded most enthusiastically to the
challenges of the transition from silent to sound cinema was Jean
Renoir.
In his silent films, Renoir had shown a consistent flair
for innovation but few, if any, of these early works drew favourable
critical attention and none was a commercial success. The
director's fortunes were to show a dramatic change for the better when
synchronised sound came along, transforming the art of filmmaking
overnight. Naturally, it was the diehard experimentalists and
young Turks like Renoir who benefited most from this development.
Renoir's first sound film,
On purge bébé (1931),
a chaotic adaptation of a Feydeau farce, was to be his first box
office hit. It was this unexpected success that gave Renoir
considerable freedom on his next film, freedom that he exploited
mercilessly.
Renoir's producers Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebé were
convinced that
La Chienne,
adapted from a lowbrow novel by Georges de La Fouchardière,
would be a comedy in a similar vein to Renoir's previous film.
Renoir refused to show them the rushes, or even the script, until the
filming had been completed. When they saw what Renoir had given
them - an anarchic mix of black comedy and social drama - the producers
were so horrified that they locked him out of the editing suite.
It was only after he had failed to come up with a satisfactory edit
that Braunberger allowed Renoir back on board to complete the
film. The result may not have impressed the critics at the
time (many wrote it off as tawdry sensationalism) but it was very
popular with the cinema-going public. The film proved to be
hugely influential, not only in France, where it spawned poetic realism
and early attempts at neo-realism, but also in America, laying the
foundation for what we now know as classic film noir.
La Chienne could easily have
been a bog standard melodrama, of the kind that was all too prevalent
in the late 1920s, early 30s. It contains all the familiar
archetypes: the weak put-upon husband, the intolerant virago of a wife,
the unfaithful mistress and the unscrupulous hoodlum. The story
may not be overly original but Renoir takes it and delivers something
that is fresh, vibrant and cinematographically daring. As the
amusing puppet-show prologue to the film implies, the film does not
easily fit into the well-defined genres of its time. It is
neither a social drama, a melodrama nor a comedy. Rather, it is an
undisciplined melange of genres, sometimes exquisitely funny, sometimes
desperately bleak, but stylish and enthralling throughout.
La Chienne establishes a
template for most of the films that Renoir would make in the 1930s,
films in which the well-ordered world of the bourgeoisie is threatened
by the forces of anarchy (base human passions, individuality and the
longing for freedom).
La
Chienne challenged the expectations of audiences, bringing a
heightened sense of reality to the fictional film narrative which would
have a lasting and far-reaching impact. Whilst many other
filmmakers of the early 1930s were content with turning out airless
melodramas within the cosy confines of their soundstages, Renoir
insisted on taking cinema out into the real world, to project onto the
screen ordinary life as it is,
sur
le vif, not just an arid staged imitation. Still life was
not for Renoir.
Renoir's mania for experimentation is apparent in almost every shot of
La Chienne. The film is
particularly noteworthy for its camerawork and its use of
sound. One of the main technical challenges posed by early
sound cinema was that directors were no longer able to use the large
arc lamps that had been employed in the silent era. These lamps
gave a huge depth of focus but they were too noisy and had to be
replaced with less powerful substitutes. This is why in many
early silent films there is hardly any motion: if the actors were to
move, they would soon go out of focus. The more imaginative and
artistically minded directors like Renoir were determined to regain
some of the fluidity of silent films, and this they achieved by
allowing the camera to move with the actors.
In
La Chienne, there are
several scenes where the camera follows the actors around the set,
almost clinging to them like an over-earnest autograph hunter, and this
gives the film an unsettlingly voyeuristic feel. In addition to
moving the camera, Renoir often alters the focus within a shot, so that
our attention moves from the foreground to the background. The
best example of this is the scene in Legrand's apartment where the
focus moves away from Legrand being berated by his wife to a girl
playing the piano in a room across the street, a neat way for Renoir to
make a connection between two unrelated characters with artistic
potential.
Renoir's use of sound is even more daring and, again, is a massive
departure from what most other film directors were doing at the time,
which was simply to record spoken dialogue. Renoir appears to be
far more preoccupied with background sound than dialogue, and often the
former masks the latter so that we can hardly make out what the
characters are saying. There is a great deal of music in the
film, but all of it is in the background, part of the cacophony of
everyday life. In the crucial scene in which Legrand murders
Lulu, the cries of the protagonists are drowned out by a popular tune
sung by a street singer. This juxtaposition of ordinary life with
high drama injects a shocking reality into the sequence and highlights
the horror of Legrand's crime.
Whilst the main protagonists are easily recognisable as archetypes,
they are all richly drawn and portrayed with surprising depth, and this
also adds to the film's realism. Michel Simon's Legrand soon
proves that he is far more than the mousy bank employee we first take
him to be. There is clearly a cruel and sadistic streak to his
character, which first becomes evident when he is confronted with his
wife's first husband and sees an easy way out of his Hellish
marriage. Having killed his mistress in a fit of jealousy, he
appears to delight in the fact that her boyfriend will take the blame
for the murder. Finally, destitute and jobless, the layers of
artifice stripped away, Legrand shows who he really is, an egoistical
free spirit who is a near relation of the carefree tramp that Simon
would play in a later Renoir film,
Boudu sauvé des eaux
(1932). (Is it possible that Legrand and Boudu are one in the
same man?)
The two other main characters - the femme fatale Lulu and her loathsome
pimp Dédé - are also more complex than we might
expect. Janie Marèze plays Lulu not as a calculating
temptress (the more conventional film noir heroine) but as a
compassionate innocent. There is no malice in her nature and she
treats her two male admirers - Legrand and Dédé - more
with maternal tenderness than the sultry attentions of a
streetwalker. It pleases Legrand to spoil her, so naturally she
takes what he gives her. Dédé derives a sadistic
pleasure in ill-treating her, so she accepts this with equal
insouciance. Lulu is an early example of the noble heroine that
recurs throughout Renoir's oeuvre, a willing martyr to the unthinking
savagery and selfishness of the male sex (the title
La Chienne is
clearly meant to be ironic). Other manifestations of
Lulu include Séverine in
La Bête humaine (1938)
and Elsa in
La Grande illusion (1937).
It is worth noting that Janie Marèze was not Renoir's choice for
the role of Lulu - she was imposed on him by the production team after
the director had fallen out with his wife Catherine Hessling, the
actress originally intended for the part. Renoir may not have
been happy with the choice but Marèze is far better suited for
the role than Hessling, whose heavy mannerisms and sudden changes of
mood would have robbed Lulu of her almost saintly innocence and made
her far less convincing as a victim.
Making his screen debut as the deliciously wicked Dédé is
Georges Flamant, who was given the role (apparently) because Renoir
knew of his criminal associations in real life. Both in his
appearance and his behaviour, Flamant has the aura of a man who has had
firsthand experience of Le Milieu (the underworld) and he is perfect
for the part of Dédé, a man who casually brutalises women
and threatens physical bodily harm in every glance he makes.
After this remarkable debut, Flamant enjoyed some success as an actor,
invariably playing taciturn anti-hero types, and ended up as Viviane
Romance's first husband. Janie Marèze was not so
fortunate - she died in a road accident not long after completing work
on the film, in a car driven by Flamant. Michel Simon had fallen
in love with the actress and blamed Renoir for her death, even
threatening to kill him. This temporary rift led Renoir to shelve
his plans to make a film version of Shakespeare's
Hamlet, with Simon cast as the
indecisive Dane.
In 1945, Fritz Lang remade
La Chienne
in Hollywood as
Scarlet Street, with Edward G.
Robinson taking the part originally played by Michel Simon.
Whilst this later film is certainly a far more polished production,
distinguished by some captivating performances and imaginative
photography, it lacks the raw vitality and brutal realism that makes
Renoir's film so authentic and emotionally involving. Whilst
La Chienne would soon be
overshadowed by the other great films that its director made in the
same decade, there is no doubt that it represents something of a landmark
in cinema. Its innovative touches would influence a whole
generation of filmmakers, inspiring them to make the most of the
opportunities afforded by sound cinema. More crucially, it helped
French cinema to regain its badly beaten prestige, having succumbed to
the might of the Hollywood moviemaking machine during the First World
War. It is no exaggeration to say that synchronised sound saved
France's film industry in the 1930s, and at least some of the credit
for this cinematic renaissance should be attributed to Jean Renoir and
his roughly hewn trailblazer
La
Chienne.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Jean Renoir film:
On purge bébé (1931)