IV.

Political Influences and Concerns

From the middle of the 1930s, Renoir’s concern with the spatial and social context of his dramas acquired an explicitly political dimension. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), one of his finest films—scripted by Jacques Prévert from a story by set designer Jean Castanier—shows a group of characters, a microcosm of society, whose lives and consciousness are transformed when a cooperative (involving both workers and capitalists) replaces an exploitative and corrupt employer. Lange himself changes from an unworldly dreamer into a successful writer of pulp Westerns. His transformation evokes the 1930s politicization of artists and intellectuals in response to the rise of fascism, including that of Renoir himself, responding as he did to the influence of his regular editor and new partner, Marguerite Houllé, who took the name Renoir. She was from a working-class background, and a campaigner for female suffrage, which was only achieved in France following the Liberation.

Renoir supervised the shooting of La Vie est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us/People of France) for the French Communist Party’s campaign in the 1936 election, then wrote and recorded the commentary for Ciné-Liberté’s release of The Spanish Earth (1937), Joris Ivens’s documentary about life in government-held areas during the Spanish Civil War.

From the same year as The Spanish Earth, La Grande Illusion was a major international success, and remains his best-known and most popular film. It is a plea, as much to the reactionary forces inside France as to those outside, on behalf of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, and against anti-Semitism, the “religion” of the Nazis. These ideals, he suggests in La Marseillaise, a film initially financed by trade-union subscriptions, are heroically embodied in the ordinary people, not the powerful national leader glorified by his famous compatriot Abel Gance in his Napoléon (1927; re-released in a sound version in 1934).

Renoir has written that, during the shooting of La Règle du Jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game), he was torn between two conflicting desires, to make a comedy and to tell a tragic story. This tension resulted in probably his most complex work: “It’s a war film; nevertheless there’s not a mention of war in it. Beneath its benign appearance, this story strikes at the very structure of our society” (Ma Vie et Mes Films). Even the smallest elements of plot and characterization work together, as if in a marvellous mechanical construction, to precipitate the murder of a national hero. This image of a society ultimately as out of control as a runaway train eerily anticipates the national disaster to befall France a year later, when the country was invaded by Germany. The portrayal is all the more disturbing because so many of the characters are so likeable, their repeated inability to make a decisive choice resulting from generosity and understanding.

Not surprisingly, audiences found the film’s vision, and its changes of pace and tone, from drawing-room comedy through farce to tragedy and cover-up, intolerable. In despair, Renoir told Houllé to recut the film, omitting the passages most offensive to the audience.