Although it was met with diverse responses when it was released, few films have earned such universal critical acclaim as Renoir’s masterpiece. The “game” is life: Renoir and cinematographer Henri Cartier-Bresson paint a broad canvas, taking as their subject the foibles of bourgeois French society. At a weekend hunting party on the eve of World War II, amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests and the servants in a Gallic “Upstairs, Downstairs.” The refusal of one guest to play by society’s rules sparks a chain of events that ends in tragedy, providing, in Renoir’s words, a “dramatic fantasy” of a “a rich, complex society. . . dancing on a volcano.”
Appears in: Classic French Cinema, 2017 on Celluloid
Genres: Drama
Other Films by Jean Renoir
French Cancan
Jean Renoir’s return to France in the early 1950s, following more than a decade of self-exile, culminated in his first film back on home soil: the legendary, extremely colorful French Cancan. The can-can, an old-fashioned dance in the world of the film (circa the 1890s), experiences a massive revival at the hands of Henri Danglard …
The Golden Coach
Renoir’s 18th-century comic fantasy is a valentine to the theater and the music of Vivaldi, starring the larger-than-life Anna Magnani. A commedia dell’arte troupe from Italy arrives in an 18th-century Peruvian town where the viceroy, infatuated by the leading actress Camilla, presents her with the fabulous golden coach, a symbol of power that he intended …
The River
Renoir’s film, late in his filmmaking career, sees the master working in color for the first time. The story follows a well-to-do British family living on the banks of the Ganges River. Teenager Harriet (Patricia Walters) and her sisters are brought up in an environment that melds the philosophies of East and West in equal …
The Grand Illusion
A humanistic, sensitive masterpiece nearly unparalleled in cinema history, Renoir’s WWI drama concerns the trials and tribulations of a group of French POWs under German imprisonment. Most of the group are working-class, led by Lieutenant Maréchal (an unforgettable Jean Gabin); they scheme and plot—sometimes to the point of revolt—to escape the prison camp, meanwhile reveling …