13 out of 14 people found the following review
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What a great world that can find space for both
this and SCARLET STREET. (possible spoiler)
Author: berthe bovy (hitch1899_@hotmail.com)
from paris, france
24 February 2000
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Based on the same novel, this film and Fritz Lang’s
magnificent SCARLET STREET are almost identical in terms of plot. A painfully
shy and friendless office cashier, Maurice Legrand (brutally ironic name),
lives with his shrewish wife, and paints cathartically in his spare time. After
an office party one night, he comes across a young brute hitting a woman. They
are actually lovers, pimp Dede and employee Lulu, but contrive a scheme to have
Legrand pay for a well-appointed apartment while Lulu pretends to be his lover.
To pay for this he robs his employer, and when this runs out, the lovers fob
off his paintings as Lulu’s. They are a success and earn her fame and fortune.
Legrand is paralysed by life with his intolerable
wife, whose sublime military dead husband is repeatedly extolled to Legrand’s
detriment. One day, however, he comes across this very much alive paragon of
virtue, a blackmailing tramp who feigned his death to escape the same wife.
Legrand sees an opportunity to at last divest himself of her, and, on the
pretext of stealing her money, reunite the happy couple. Delighted, he packs
up, and heads for his young mistress, who, unsurprisingly, lies in bed with her
lover.
As the subject matter are almost (thought, crucially,
not totally) identical, the difference between the two films must be sought in
approach, style, emphasis and omission. Lang’s 1945 film owes much to the
contemporary film noir cycle, as well as the subversive male melodrama. SCARLET
STREET is much more about the price of humanity and expression under
capitalism, the alienation of both the worker and the artist from his work, as
well as the suffocating nature of American respectability.
STREET has been accused of being a compromised essay
in guilt, but it is not remorse that torments Chris Cross for the rest of his
life, so much as his failure to escape his initial hell on earth; his blind
adhesion to a false escape that taunts him even after it has been removed. Lang’s
style is perfectly suited to this interpretation, harsh, austere, geometric,
entrapping his characters in formal grids, both interior and exterior, fixing
them with pitiless irony when they seem most free.
This is alien to Renoir’s reputation for a warm,
humanistic temperament, and his film is much brighter and more playful,
although, in the early 1930s, we have many of noir’s central tenets - the weak
man brought down by a femme fatale; the inevitability of Fate expressed through
plot; the use of interiors, framing and shadows to visualise the mindset of the
trapped protagonist.
But Renoir’s attitude to all this is not altogether
serious. There is a structural affirmation of play that seems to reject the
film’s literal aspirations. For instance, CHIENNE opens with three Punch and
Judy-type puppets fighting over what kind of film this is. While their struggle
enacts the events of the film, it also ridicules it; and their final conclusion
is that the film has no moral and isn’t about anything.
In a very real sense, it isn’t; it’s about the
destruction of values and morals. Lulu and Dede betray certain moral codes in
manipulating Legrand; the courts emasculate themselves by executing an innocent
(of murder anyway) man; Legrand escapes his shrewish wife, his oppressive job
and lives the blissful, almost communal life of a tramp (which, as has been
pointed out, looks ahead to Renoir’s next masterpiece, BOUDU SAUVE DES EAUX), reward
for theft and murder.
Renoir achieves this amorality with a tacitness that
is startling in retrospect. Although he is constantly ironising throughout the
film - often the performers begin performing (see Legrand revealing her ‘dead’
husband to his wife); the studied use of frames, mirrors, paintings, windows
etc. continually draw attention to the constructed nature of the film - his
critique of the bourgeois is more generous than Lang’s, its oppression less a
living thing than lived in.
Legrand’s predicament is expressed in his being made
crouch at home and work by vast bourgeois accoutrements, constantly bumping
into, and being dwarfed by, things. By tiny details, such as a neighbour
hanging out washing, or a child playing a piano, Renoir points to another world
outside this torrid prison. This is typical of his method - his privileging of
deep space asks us to look and imagine beyond, to interpret what we see and
look for alternatives.
This is most brilliantly illustrated at the moment of
the film’s climax, when Legrand discovers his betrayal. Instead of resorting to
heated close-ups, hysterical music, meaningful shadows, Renoir quietly takes
his camera outside of the scene, moves it slowly around the apartment until,
non-dramatically, we see its components through a curtained window. We are
reefed out of the drama, shown that it is a drama, that there are other
realities, namely that of the camera, and our own, and asked to ruminate
thereon.
This is not to suggest that CHIENNE is a chilly
formal excercise. Renoir loves people too much for it to be that, but asks us
to look at what shapes people and their decisions. If he’s not quite as
sympathetic to his villains as Lang, he places much emphasis on class, and Lulu’s
showing her friend her new apartment with its bathroom is very touching and
highly revealing. Likewise, Renoir doesn’t make as much play with Legrand’s
paintings as Lang - they are less expressions of his diseased unhappiness for a
start - but puts them into a wider context of framing and perspective (it’s
ironic that austere formalist Lang should seem more humanistic than humanistic
Renoir).
The murder scene is a genuine masterpiece, weaving
together all the different themes of sexual unhappiness, betrayal, the public
and private space (the murder is intercut with a beautifully nostalgic busking
session on the street), art as expression and concealment. The whole sequence -
from murder to Dede’s discovery of the body - is a model of Renoir’s method,
formally precise, yet powerfully emotional.
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11 out of 13 people found the following review
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Jean Renoir examines the tragedy and comedy of
life and creates a masterpiece
Author: raskimono
19 May 2005
I do not know what else to add to the previous two
reviews before mine. The movie begins as two puppets argue about the theme of
the movie we are about to see. One swears it is a comedy. The other avers that
it be a tragedy. Both are slapped out of the way by another who says it is
neither. Let us be the judge. The tale of a sad sack bank employee who sweats
his whole life in a job he hates and falls for a low-life woman has
similarities to the Dietrich classic Blue Angel but this movie has bigger
themes and issues on its mind. His hilarious deduction and situational comedy
as the man tries to outwit his way out of his marriage and the calamity that
befalls him diagnoses the gray line that is life. And the bitter sweet ending
endorses that in life, we may not get what we want but we might revel in what
we need; and true happiness is a figment of mere necessity. A wonderful movie
that must be seem.
P.S. For those who appreciate the art of movies, you cannot but
marvel at the directional technique of Renoir. The man understands cinema. His transitional shots are sublime and ridiculous in a good
way propelling the movie along. And a murder scene is so effectively
staged, it reminds that it might have been executed by Hitchcock himself. Long
live great cinema and great directors who enrich our empathy for it!!!
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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A story of all times.
Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen,
The Netherlands
29 March 2008
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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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Interesting piece and must-see for fans of Renoir
Author: cmccann-2 from Canada
9 June 2013
After a series of movies during the silent era, La
Chienne (1931) was Jean Renoir’s first sound picture. It tells the story of
Maurice Legrand, a naive man who falls in love with a prostitute and
subsequently has his financial resources extorted from him by the prostitute
and her pimp. La Chienne is an interesting early look at thematic concerns and
stylistic devices which Renoir would return to in his later films, and a great
picture in its own right.
The film follows Maurice
Legrand (Michel Simon), a weak man who takes disrespect from both his wife and
the co-workers at his job. One night while walking home from work, Legrand
encounters the character Lulu (Janie Mereze) being beaten in the street. He
intervenes and walks Lulu home, becoming smitten with her during their first
interaction. Unbeknownst to Maurice, however, Lulu is actually in cahoots with
her pimp boyfriend Dede (the man who was beating her earlier in the film),
merely playing up her romance with Legrand so he’ll give her money and
paintings which her and Dede will later re-sell at a higher price.
Like many early talkie films, the acting and dialogue
comes across a bit stiff and impersonal - Renoir still working in silent mode
and yet to fully accommodate changes in cinema technology. That being said, the
production value is excellent, the film filled with the soft focus photography
and fluid camera movements that would later become Renoir’s staple. The film’s
greatest strength lies in Renoir’s humanity for his characters; as a puppet
show at the beginning suggests, in this story of a man putting his love in the
wrong place and getting used there are no heroes and villains, only people,
people with their own histories, own potential for good and bad, and own
self-interest. This element of the film makes it feel grounded in real life and
provides it with a strong authenticity.
In summary, La Chienne is a great early piece by
Renoir which serves as a precursor to his later films with its similar thematic
concerns and style. If you are looking for an entry point into Renoir’s body of
work or have seen the director’s more famous films (Grand Illusion, Rules of
the Game) and want to backtrack to get to know his oeuvre more intimately, I
would highly recommend it. It is the film that kicked off a decade-long winning
streak for the French auteur, but taken on its own it’s also just a fine piece
of cinema.
8/10
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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
A timeless tale of He, She and The Other Guy
Author: Gary170459 from Derby, UK
18 August 2014
If you’re someone who likes the films of Jean Renoir
this is a must-see – that’s my highest praise. It’s pretty essential in the
history of French cinema too, although the keeping of it in perspective is now
absolutely essential thanks to the onslaught of Time. As someone who has loved
the works of Renoir all my life I don’t know why it’s taken me decades to get
round to La Chienne - I’ve had it to watch for years, but at least I’ve finally
managed it. Advice: don’t leave it too long.
Timid art-loving bank clerk with a scold for a wife
who carries a torch for her dead previous husband falls in love with a woman
who carries a torch for her rather violent waster of a boyfriend. Everyone is
on the make, everyone is dislikeable, and everyone gets what they deserve – with
one apparent exception. Michel Simon as Legrand acted his heart out surrounded
by the circling human sharks, both direct and in the case of all the
art-dealers, indirect. In Boudu he became a rather shabby shark. Janie Marese
also had an intensely realistic part in the Tart without a heart Lulu – a
tragedy that she died in a car crash on the way to the film’s premiere. The
gleaming photography was inventive for the time, almost magical in its
spareness, and you’re utterly immersed the world of 1931 its atmosphere, its
people and their mores. The sound was a bit primitive, but it is in real life.
Marvellous stuff - the
realism is complete, it’s either a human tragicomedy or not, or a simple dark
moral tale or not or nothing at all, or not. Anyway, imho it’s most definitely
a perfect companion piece for the classic Boudu which was to follow the next
year from Renoir.
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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Red, White and Blue Angel...
Author: TypoMonq from United States
18 February 2013
The narrative frame (puppet show) of La Chienne (The
Bitch) certainly defies realism, which is all the more apt since the story is
told tongue-in-cheek and the characters are caricatures. The title is no
cultural argot misnomer as the drama seems akin to a circus show involving a
hibernating bear (the cashier), swallowing anaconda (the whore), howling wolf
(the wife) and vampire bat (the pimp) all thrown into the same pit together.
What arises is great drama and misplaced sympathy by audiences. Der Blaue Engel
(1930) is infinitely more straightforward in its portrayal of paralysis and
consumption (not to sound too Kracauerian here). La Chienne is layered - almost
convoluted, but without being obvious. Although the puppets in the narrative
frame assert that the characters are plain and the drama is amoral - they are
just puppets! How plain is a woman-beating drunk? How amoral is a drama that
ends in a courtroom? La Chienne is a film that would have evoked different
emotions from each audience member. For some (puppet-like) spectators, the
narrative frame proves familiar and reassuring while for a more engaged
spectator, deeper mysteries can be unearthed. The narrative frame is thus in
service to Renoir’s impresario approach to film auteurship. “What matters in
life is to know the right people” is a statement scoffed at by Simon’s
character and to his ultimate ruin. The ending itself has a utilitarian feel (a
complimentary reversal of M. Lange in many ways). “Ca prend de tout pour faire
un monde” is one of the final lines in the film and underscores the teasing out
of an ambiguous politics pushing and pulling between utilitarian affirmations
and humanist sensitivities. As for Renoir’s stylistic developments in La
Chienne - there is a great use of depth of field in key scenes (especially in
Simon’s art studio). The narrow hallways as a mode for the construction of
offscreen space is prevalent (as in On Purge). Mobile framing creeps in at the
end of the film and is ironically liberating. It’s most novel use is when
Renoir sways back and forth with the dancing couple (pimp and whore) in the
bar. There are some nice tracking shots at the police station as well.
Although, Renoir is starting to liberate the camera in La Chienne, it remains
in the service of character psychology and not construction of space by an
unobtrusive auteur. In this regard, La Chienne shows itself to be a reasonable
midway point between Renoir’s silent films and his 30s masterpieces.
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Michel Simon falls for prostitute Janie Marese
Author: msroz from United States
22 October 2014
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The story is well-known to film noir fans because it
was remade as “Scarlet Street”. As told by Jean Renoir, this excellent film is
replete with irony. As advertised at the outset, this punctures big holes in
both conventional morality and any optimistic view that human nature as it
reveals itself in human relationships can ever be seen as anything but a
complex mixture of virtues and vices.
No character in this story is a conventional hero or
protagonist. No character is a moral paragon or even close to it or even
aspires to it. Michel Simon is the putative hero, but he becomes a
murderer who lets another man be executed for his crime. He’s henpecked and making no move to escape his condition
until he happens to fall for a prostitute, Janie Marese. She’s strictly out for
what she can get out of Simon materially, and her emotions allow her to be
dominated by her pimp, Georges Flamant. However, Marese is not a malicious
person. Flamant manipulates Marese. Although he lies to his pals, he comes
across as being true to his own swaggering self and not being a really nasty or
vindictive person. He is visibly upset after seeing Marese’s corpse.
Michel sets Marese up in an apartment and resorts to embezzlement. He takes
great glee when his shrew of a wife’s first husband, thought to be dead, turns
up alive. The wife is a terror, but Simon clearly has some dark emotions. He’s
as amoral as the story. Under the weight of material drives and emotions,
morality disintegrates for all of these characters.
Renoir’s direction is well thought out, creative,
careful, and effective. The style is not at all the dominant Hollywood style of
its time. Fritz Lang’s style in “Scarlet Street” is also vastly different than
Renoir’s in “La Chienne”. As an example, there are several scenes that
establish Simon at work or in the company of his fellow workers. In the first
case, there is a dinner around a big table. We see all the men first having a
very good time. When the camera finally moves to the seated Simon, we see him
quiet, head slumped, and we don’t get a full view of his face. He’s aloof, in a
different world. Then when the men move out to go to some night spots, Simon
parries their requests with obtuse sayings. In the second scene, the camera
follows Simon as he passes by each man at his desk. He’s again looking down at
his account book, oblivious to them and their comments. In two very different
ways, Renoir has told the story so as to inform us about Simon’s character.
The murder in “La Chienne” is not shown on camera,
that is, no actual physical violence is shown, and no blood is shown. It’s done
in a totally different way than one might see on today’s screens for typical
movies. We see the pair together before and after the deed is done. In “Scarlet
Street”, we see Robinson stab Bennett 4 or 5 times, she being beneath the
covers on the bed. Also, no blood. Although both killings are in anger, the
Robinson character is made more sympathetic. Simon shows no remorse. He is
sadistic and mean, unlike Robinson. This is only the beginning of differences
in the two movies that could take up many pages to analyze. “La Chienne” is a
much more realistic picture than “Scarlet Street”.
Who is the bitch? It’s not Marese through and
through, even if she taunts Simon. It’s more Simon’s wife, and maybe she has
helped create the kind of a man that Simon is.
“La Chienne” provides a good test case for the
question of what a film noir is. The stories are the same or almost the same
for this movie and the remake, yet “La Chienne” is not usually called a noir
while “Scarlet Street” is. What tips the balance? It cannot be the dark
photography alone in “Scarlet Street” because of the many films subsequent to
it that are called noirs and lack its darkness. Is it because the devious
characters of Duryea and Bennett are played up? They are taken more for granted
in “La Chienne”. I have no answers.
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Renoir’s austere examination of society’s
corrupting influence
Author: timmy_501 from United States
7 October 2011
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
By 1931, Renoir had completely abandoned the
innovative superimpositions and wild set designs that characterized his silent
films. In La Chienne, he favored a stripped down, almost austere form of
realism; nearly every shot in the film is taken from a medium distance and the camera
movement is utilitarian. Even the compositions offer few surprises, though one
shot neatly emphasizes a character’s reaction to his lover’s betrayal by
detaching the perspective and filtering it through various obstructions.
The stripped down style Renoir employs in the film
brings the focus to the plot of the film, which involves an old fashioned,
wholesome man who is mocked and taken advantage of by everyone he encounters.
Eventually, this influence corrupts him totally and he joins the dregs of society.
This happens gradually enough to make his transformation believable and
genuinely shocking. It also suggests that society is rotten to the core, an
idea that it has in common with the Naturalism movement, of which earlier
Renoir efforts Whirlpool of Fate and Nana are obviously a part. Although it’s
tempting to read the film as a misogynist work, especially given that the title
translates to The Bitch and that both of the major female characters are
absolutely detestable, it’s important to note that most of the minor male
characters and especially the pimp are equally as reprehensible as either of
the two women. In fact, the only character who is treated with much sympathy is
the protagonist Legrand and even he ultimately falls from grace. Although Renoir
would later gain a reputation for his humanism, this film’s portrayal of
humanity is as dark as they come.
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10 out of 20 people found the
following review useful:
very good but much different than the remake
Author: planktonrules from Bradenton,
Florida
13 October 2005
Even though the movie Scarlet Street is a remake of
La Chienne, they bear many differences in the plot and tone of the movie. While
Scarlet Street is very Film Noir in style, the original film (La Chienne) is an
odd movie that is very hard to classify because it seems made up of several
different genres AND because it deliberately avoids going the directions you
think it will. While not a terrific movie (the plot lags here and there and the
acting, with the exception of the fantastic Simon, is uneven). I give the movie
a lot of credit for trying to be different and for a 1931 French film, the
production values are good.
Although I will not explain exactly how they differ,
know that this French film does not follow the Hayes code so it will seem a bit
seamier than the American version and the ending is anything but Hollywood
inspired. In fact, the French version is MUCH better, because the later
Hollywood film “cops out” and tacks on a much more predictable and sanitized
ending. Now that I think about it, chienne” means “bitch”--this SHOULD clue you
in that the French film is indeed seedier.
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