Film Freak Central

The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

La règle du jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir

by Jefferson Robbins One political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir's masterwork in pre-World War II France, and it doesn't come amidst the posturing of the elegant rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it's in the kitchen, where the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the help as a "yid" whose family made good with money and a title. The gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who's just materialized on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: "Isn't that right, Schumacher?" The italics are mine, and despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the marquis's game warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky, though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200 years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He's rough and field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he's also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye's Jewishness, Schumacher demurs: "I don't know what you're talking about." But the point is made, the knife already twisted.

La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we're in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he's shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant's broken arm.

Swamp Water (1941) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C
starring Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews
screenplay by Dudley Nichols, based on the novel by Vereen Bell
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw Jean Renoir's Swamp Water stands out as an example of how an artist's genius can assert itself even when his product has been taken away from him, re-edited and in some places reshot. Renoir's insistence on actually shooting on location in Georgia's Okefenokee, declared a Federal Wildlife Refuge by FDR in 1937, resulted in a grassroots movement lobbying Darryl Zanuck to hold the premiere locally. It was an artistic choice Godard would later say "revolutionized Hollywood." I'm not sure what Okefenokee residents must have thought of the picture, one that is equal parts offensive cornpone melodrama and haunted, gravid Romanticism. There's an indelible, hard-to-quantify melancholy to the film that's at odds with its boilerplate narrative; it feels like a Joseph Conrad, even if it reads like a Vereen Bell. It's an interesting case study, too, because it might never have happened were Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game not savaged by critics and audiences in his native France, where it would go on to be radically recut, twice-banned, and destroyed in a bombing raid. I like this story, because I think Americans get a bad rap for not recognizing the fruit of their creativity. I like it even more because the French get a lot of credit for being the ones who do.