Peter Bogdanovich has a great appreciation for Jean Renoir over at the New York Observer. He regards Renoir as “The Best Director, Ever,” and who am I to argue? He writes:

“In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the highest place in their pantheon for Jean Renoir: They called him ‘the father of the New Wave.’”

Indeed, there is a thread between Renoir and the best of the New Wavers . . . I think it’s seen most clearly in Truffaut, in films like The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. Truffaut’s best films share with Renoir’s a breathtaking, grounded humanity, and a regard for their characters that only a few others demonstrate. As Bogdanovich says,

“He was, simply, the best . . . and today if I want to remind myself that the movies are capable of achieving a level of transcendence comparable to a painting by Rembrandt or Turner, or to a symphony by Mozart, I run a film by Renoir.”

My own first Renoir was The Rules of the Game, and it set me back a ways. Despite what Bogdanovich calls “the seeming simplicity of Renoir,” it took several viewings to appreciate what was happening. There was so much of it, due in part to Renoir’s innovative (at the time) staging, which involved intricate choreography on multiple planes within the frame. That means potentially important information can — and sometimes does — take place in the background as well as the foreground.

A second level of complexity in Rules lies in Renoir’s elaborate narrative construction, with a complete set of “upstairs,” upper-class relationships mirrored by a downstairs, working-class set. It illustrates another of his abiding concerns: the social construction of society and how it affects relationships and one’s view of the world at large.

Perhaps the contemporary director most in tune with these sensibilities was the late Robert Altman, whose Gosford Park plays like a Rules of the Game filtered through post-modern sensibilities. There’s the same mirrored construction, the same deep staging which, in Altman’s case, includes his famous overlapping dialog. Altman’s film didn’t come in for the derision Rules did; by the time of Gosford Park, it was common to poke fun at the ruling class. Back in the day, Parisians would demonstrate noisily in the theater if they disliked a film; in his delightful introduction to Rules on the Criterion DVD, Renoir says that one disgruntled viewer set fire to a newspaper in protest. Now that’s a tough crowd.

Rules of the Game came at the end of a string of masterpieces that is unequaled in film. As Bogdanovich put it, beginning in 1930 he made a “virtually uninterrupted series of both diverse and consistently quite extraordinary masterworks.” The ’30s produced, among others, his best known film Grand Illusion (1937); the tasty noir La Bête Humaine (1938, which I profiled here); Les Bas-fonds (1936), a translation of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths to the slums of Paris; and the social satire Boudou Saved from Drowning (1932).

All of these films are available in fine Criterion editions, along with his Technicolor masterpiece The River (1951) and three fine light comedies: The Golden Coach ( 1953), French Cancan (1954), and Elena and Her Men (1956). In all of them, Renoir demonstrates the fine humanism that was his trademark. To quote Peter Bogdanovich one more time,

At the heart of Renoir is the heart. No other director in the Western world has shown so much of the human condition in such a timeless way.

If you haven’t yet discovered Renoir, you are in for a treat.

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