La chienne

With "la chienne",French cinema enters the pathway to genius.During the thirties,it will be one of the best in the world.In those ancient times,it used to walk from strength to strength,encompassing the most phenomenal innovations the seventh art had ever known.Opening and closing his film with a puppet theater,Renoir predates Mankiewicz's "Sleuth" prologue(1972) and countless others by decades.Punch and Judy,what a derision!

Renoir has begun his wholesale massacre;the bourgeois society ,the army ,the justice are his main targets.M.Legrand,whose spouse is a shrew,keeps a mistress,Lulu,(la chienne=the bitch)who doesn't care a little bit about him and who has herself another man in her life ,Dédé.This dandy sponges her off.Legrand and Lulu are actually longing for tenderness,but a society in which money and respectability run rampant leaves them with no chance at all.It's when he rebels against it that Legrand will find his way.His wife-shrew always compares him to his first hubby,a warrant officer killed in action during WW1?Never mind that,when the soldier comes back -he was actually prisoner in Germany-,Legrand gets rid of his missus!Now he thinks he can live with Lulu but he finds her in bed with her lover.Now Legrand will despise the rule of the game(that's Renoir's 1939 movie title).

SPOILERS.SPOILERS.SPOILERS. You've got to follow the pack.Legrand kills Lulu (as the precedent user has pointed it out,the scene is a model of film noir murder:we see nothing of the crime but a knife;the camera stays in the street,focusing on a busker,playing a heartrending tune on her violin,only showing the windows of the house.)When Dédé is accused of the murder,Legrand will not surrender:he used to be a respectable man,and he knows that the society will always be siding with the "moral ",and that it will be happy to condemn a lazy pimp.Renoir allows himself the most immoral ending you can think of,and in 1931,at that!

At the end of the movie,Legrand,who now thoroughly refuses the golden rules,has become a tramp.It's a tramp like this who will rise from the gutter to shake the bourgeois society in "la chienne" follow-up,"Boudu sauvé des eaux"(avoid the remake"down and out in Beverly Hills").It's no coincidence if Michel Simon plays Legrand and Boudu.These two works are Renoir at his most ferocious .

"La Chienne" is a tragic crime drama and one of the pioneers of sound film in French cinema.

The plot follows Maurice, a kind-hearted banker who is also a talented amateur painter. He is in an unhappy marriage with his abusive wife, Adele, whose husband died during World War I. One evening, after a company celebration, Maurice notices a man's violent behavior towards a woman on the street. He decides to help this attractive woman, named Lulu...

The thematic focus of this film revolves around the interpersonal relationships of the protagonists, who find themselves in an emotional and social conflict. In addition, their options for escaping their life situations are very limited. The film also addresses themes of passionate desire, manipulation, revenge, and social decay.

Director Jean Renoir skillfully uses the plot to reveal the most intimate emotions in a decaying and corrupt circle of human relations. He sets a trap for the main protagonist, who, in fleeing from an unhappy marriage, enters a manipulative relationship filled with moral ambiguity and deceit, even though all Maurice seeks is a bit of affection and love. This leads him to play his manipulative game.

The atmosphere of the film leans towards tragic melodrama, and the relationships between the protagonists are complex. The camera work constantly emphasizes the emotional struggles, especially in the main character. Here, the grimness of morality is highly evident. Renoir insists on portraying social realism, which leaves a mark on character development.

Michel Simon plays Maurice, a man who emotionally exhausts himself in the search for attention and love. His character, although insecure and introverted, believes in a certain spark of love, through which he fails to see the truth. Janie Marese portrays Lulu, a beautiful and seemingly innocent yet manipulative prostitute, who seeks to satisfy the ambition of her pimp (Dede), played brilliantly by Georges Flamant, a malicious and selfish character only interested in money.

Then there is Magdeleine Berubet (Adele), Maurice's emotionally cruel and abusive wife. The performances are very strong.

This is a good melodramatic crime film that shows where a person can be led by the need for love and affection. The psychological aspects and portrayal of the darker side of intimate relationships were, in my opinion, spot on.

This 1931 Jean Renoir French movie has a story of all times. It's about a man who falls for the wrong girl and gets deeper and deeper into problems because of it. What can be more lethal than a woman? The drama is complex and multiple layered and mostly works out so well in this movie since the story by no means is a standard formulaic one. The movie does a very good job at remaining an unpredictable one throughout its entire running time and you just never know how the movie is going to end or in which direction its heading to.

Jean Renoir was one the greatest early French movie directors from the 20th century. With this movie he makes his first 'talkie'. It's notable in parts that this was still all fairly new and all for him and there are some small clumsiness's. He fairly much keeps the same style as movie-making he used for his earlier silent productions. This is mostly notable with the compositions within this movie. Not that this is a bad thing in my opinion. It gives the movie a great look and style that also seems really fitting for this particular movie and its story.

It's a great looking movie with high production values. The camera-work is just great and the movie in parts also uses some great editing, that shows a scene from different camera angles. It doesn't do this throughout the entire movie though, since like I said before, the movie mostly keeps is made silent-movie style. Perhaps it was an early sign of things that yet had to come for Jean Renoir, when he in 1937 with "La Grande illusion", that used lots of deep focus and camera-movements, something that also heavily inspired Orson Welles, among others, which is also really notable in "Citizen Kane" of course.

Michel Simon gives away one fine performance as the movie its main character but the rest of the actors in acting within this movie is perhaps a bit uneven. But perhaps this also had to do with the fact that this was Jean Renoir's first sound movie and he had to become yet accustomed to working with dialogs and actors performing them.

Unfortunately the movie uses some of its speed toward the ending but the movie at all times remains interesting and compelling enough to make you keep watching and just loving this movie right till the very end.

A great first sound movie from Jean Renoir.

9/10

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Jean Renoir's LA CHIENNE is an exhilaratingly nasty tale of a henpecked hosiery cashier's adulterous relationship with a manipulative prostitute, and the moral damnation that ensues. Noir aficionados will instantly make the SCARLET STREET connection but the unmistakable differences in execution and style render both of these masterworks sufficiently distinguishable.

Firstly, LA CHIENNE is more sexually charged of the two - evidenced by the explicit exhibition of its various on screen dalliances. SCARLET STREET on the other hand was shackled by the Hays Code where the furthest Edward G. Robinson's character gets is painting his mistress' toe nails. Restrictions of the production code notwithstanding SCARLET STREET is still the bleaker of the two and remains one of the hallmarks of classic film-noir, while LA CHIENNE benefits from its consistent tragicomedy tone.

Michel Simon is outstanding as the frustrated, love-struck painter who's almost destined to lose: he's domineered by his miserable wife when he's not being cuckolded and scammed by his deceitful mistress (and her scheming pimp boyfriend) and remains oblivious of the fact that he's merely a part-time lover but a full-time benefactor. EGR's rendition however was on a completely different level and had more psychological heft to it.

LA CHIENNE's visual aesthetic is loaded with quadrangular, window-framed, canvas-like compositions that not only resonate with the film's theatrical opening but also with the art produced by our protagonist. I also feel that it's too beautifully realised (or at least the restoration made it so) to be categorised as "noir" in the traditional sense and is devoid of conventional noir flourishes, rugged edges or pulpy vibes. Having said that it was undoubtedly instrumental in the proliferation of films that would come to be known as noir.

As an interesting aside, SCARLET STREET was not the only Lang venture that shared a literary source with a Renoir film; HUMAN DESIRE and the classic LA BÊTE HUMAINE also originate from the same Émile Zola novel.

The meek cashier of a company and aspirant painter Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon) is married with the abusive widow Adèle (Magdelaine Berubet) that mistreats him. After a celebration in the company where he works, Maurice stumbles upon a man called André "Dédé" Jauguin (Georges Flamant) hitting a young woman called Lucienne "Lulu" Pelletier (Janie Marèse) on the street. Maurice protects Lulu and brings her home. Lulu, who is a prostitute, tells to the naive Maurice that Dêdé is her brother but he is actually her pimp. Maurice rents an apartment for Lulu and she becomes her mistress. Soon he brings his paintings to the apartment since Adèle intends to throw them away. But Dêdé sells the paintings to an art dealer for a large amount telling that Lulu had painted them using the alias Claire Bloom. When Maurice stumbles upon Adèle's former husband that was supposed dead in the war, he plots a scheme to get rid of Adèle. He succeeds in his intent and surprises Lulu and Dêdé on the bed during the night. He leaves her apartment and in the morning he returns to talk to Lulu. She discloses that she loves Dêdé and humiliates Maurice, telling that the only reason she stayed with him was his paintings and the money. Maurice kills Lulu and leaves the apartment with no witness. What will happen to him?

"La chienne" is a dramatic film ahead of time directed by Jean Renoir with an amoral story of triangle of love, greedy and perfect crime. For a 1931 film, the production and the conclusion are excellent. In 1945, Fritz Lang remade this drama as "Scarlet Street" with improvements and many differences in a film-noir style but an extremely moralist conclusion maybe because of the Hayes Code. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): 'A Cadela" ("The Bitch")