Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition (Whirlpool of Fate / Nana / Charleston Parade / La Marseillaise / The Doctor's Horrible Experiment / The Elusive Corporal)

DISC 1 - Jean Renoir 2 Early Movies: LA FILLE DE L'EAU, NANA. DISC 2 - Jean Renoir Political period: LA MARSEILLAISE, + 2 short films: SUR UN AIR DE CHARLESTON, LA PETITE MARCHANDE D'ALLUMETTES. DISC 3 - 2 Later Movies: LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR CORDELIER, LE CAPORAL EPINGLE

Grand Illusion - Criterion Collection

It's long been one of the revered classics of international cinema, but there is no fine layer of dust over La Grande Illusion. Jean Renoir's film is just as vibrant, exciting, and wise as it has ever been. The story is set during World War I, mostly in a couple of German POW camps, where two very different French prisoners plot to escape: the working-class officer Maréchal (Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy) and the upper-class de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay). The suspenseful backbone of the story is formed by these escape attempts, but Renoir is primarily concerned with the way people treat each other, and especially with how class and nationality inform human relations. Most compelling of all the film's characters is the aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, unforgettably incarnated by stiff-backed Erich von Stroheim; although he runs a prison camp, von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with de Boieldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility. There is nothing dewy or naive about Renoir's vision (and two years after the release of this antiwar film, Europe was plunged into another world war), yet Grand Illusion is one of those movies that makes you feel good about such long-outmoded ideas as sacrifice and brotherhood. After it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared the film "Cinematographic Enemy Number One." There can be no higher praise. --Robert Horton

One of the very first prison escape movies, Grand Illusion is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Jean Renoir's antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay, as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein. Following a smash theatrical re-release, Criterion is proud to present Grand Illusion in a new special edition, with a beautifully restored digital transfer.

The Rules of the Game - Criterion Collection

Jean Renoir's 1939 classic is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and Criterion is very proud to present the film in a special two-disc edition. Cloaked in a comedy of manners, this scathing critique of corrupt French society is about a weekend hunting party at which amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests-which are also mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs. The refusal of one of the guests to play by society's rules sets off a chain of events that ends in tragedy.

The River - Criterion Collection

When speaking of Jean Renoir's timeless masterpiece The River, one can easily exhaust their supply of superlatives. Frequently listed among the greatest films ever made, it was Renoir's first English-language film and his first in color…and what rich, astonishing Technicolor it is! Shot by Renoir's nephew Claude, the film is a love letter to India, seen through the eyes (and narrated as memories) of an adolescent British girl living with her family near the banks of the Ganges, a location which allowed Renoir to indulge his burgeoning affection for the region, it's people, and the exotic allure of the Orient. Under challenging conditions, Renoir and author Rumer Godden adapted Godden's autobiographical novel into an elegant, loosely plotted reflection on the romance of India, and on coming of age in a culture that, until then, few Western filmgoers had ever seen on screen. (To enhance this journey to a new world, Renoir used Indian music recorded live in Calcutta instead of a traditional score; the effect is hypnotically inviting.) Blessed with eternal lessons of life, death, and love, The River offers a transcendent film experience, guaranteed to touch the heart of anyone who sees it. The film was meticulously restored to its original glory in 2004; Criterion's DVD release preserves that restoration with a pristine digital transfer. --Jeff Shannon

Director Jean Renoir's entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force.

Stage and Spectacle - Three Films by Jean Renoir (The Golden Coach / French Cancan / Elena and Her Men) - Criterion Collection

These three Jean Renoir films were not conceived as a trilogy, but they fit beautifully together in this Criterion package: all luscious with theatrical color, wry in tone, and awestruck by beautiful women. When Renoir returned to Europe after his wartime exile in Hollywood, he first turned to The Golden Coach (1953), an international co-production shot in Rome. It contains all of Renoir's love of the theatrical life, as a traveling troupe of actors arrives in a colonial town in South America, and the leading lady (lightning-quick Anna Magnani) bewitches her many suitors--yet knows she is most brilliantly alive when she is on stage. The film was shot in multiple languages; this is the English, which Renoir preferred.

French Cancan is perhaps the greatest backstage movie ever made. Jean Gabin plays a stage impresario of the 1880s (surely a stand-in for Renoir himself), hatching a plan to revive the naughty can-can and school a young ingenue (Francoise Arnoul) in the rigors of art and life. With 1956's Elena and Her Men, Renoir relies on the effortless beauty of Ingrid Bergman, as a Polish princess juggling devotees (including Jean Marais as a smitten general, for whom love trumps politics every time). While not a woman of the theater, Elena understands the value of putting on a show.

The Criterion box is an authoritative pleasure (including the pretty packaging), featuring best-possible visual transfers. Excellent archival introductions to Elena and Golden Coach are delivered by Renoir himself, shot sometime in the 1960s; Peter Bogdanovich provides a solid 10-minute talk on Cancan. A one-hour-plus, three-part Renoir interview, conducted by New Wave filmmaker-critic Jacques Rivette, is spread across all three discs; Renoir is in fascinating, aphoristic form ("Intelligence is terrible. It makes us do stupid things"). Part of an informative BBC documentary, Jean Renoir: Hollywood and Beyond, is bundled with Elena. Essays by the likes of Andrew Sarris and Jonathan Rosenbaum provide context for Renoir's celebratory but unsparing look at the intersection of Art and Life. --Robert Horton

Near the end of his long and celebrated career, master filmmaker Jean Renoir indulged his lifelong obsession with life-as-theater and directed The Golden Coach (1953), French Cancan (1955), and Elena and Her Men (1956), three delirious films, infatuated with the past, love, and artifice. Awash in jubilant Technicolor, each film interweaves public display and private feelings through the talents of three immortal film icons#Anna Magnani, Jean Gabin, and Ingrid Bergman. The Criterion Collection is proud to present these three majestic films by Jean Renoir for the first time on DVD.

The Lower Depths (Kurosawa 1957) / The Lower Depths (Renoir 1936) - Criterion Collection

Criterion's two-disc double bill of The Lower Depths provides a scintillating lesson in comparative cinema. When Jean Renoir adapted Maxim Gorky's acclaimed 1902 play in 1936, he changed the setting from Czarist Russia to an unspecified French slum, casting the great Jean Gabin as a thief struggling to rise from his misery, and Louis Jouvet as the benevolent Baron, a flat-broke gambler on a downward social spiral. Renoir altered the play considerably, retaining its serious tone while infusing it with his trademark warmth and humanity. Two decades later, Kurosawa remained faithful to Gorky while daring to craft The Lower Depths as a comedy, in which Edo-period peasants (including Toshiro Mifune, in Gabin's role) concoct lavish illusions to ease the burden of their impoverished reality. While both films remained relatively overlooked during the careers of their creators, Criterion's DVD restores them to the prominence they deserve.

Both films have been meticulously restored and remastered to Criterion's high standards; Renoir's film still shows its age, but it will never look or sound better than it does here, and Renoir provides an informative introduction culled from the same archival materials featured on Criterion's The Rules of the Game DVD. Better yet, Kurosawa's film is accompanied by a superb commentary by peerless Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, who provides a feature-length treasury of anecdotes (he had actually visited Kurosawa's set in 1957), thematic analysis, production history, and scholarly insight. A 33-minute excerpt from the Japanese TV series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create offers rare interview clips with Kurosawa and surviving members of his cast, along with script, art design, and storyboard details to illustrate Kurosawa's creative process. Kurosawa expert Stephen Prince profiles the esteemed cast of the 1957 film, and exclusive essays about both films are included in the accompanying booklet. As a kind of Rorschach test for each director's approach to style and theme, The Lower Depths offers a back-to-back master class in the art of adaptation. --Jeff Shannon

Akira Kurosawa's The Lower Depths, an adaptation of Maxim Gorky's classic proletarian play. Instead of his usual broad canvas, Kurosawa instead explores the possibilites of the stage in this film, finding intimacy in his examination of a group of destitutes, set during one of Japan's most prosperous ages. Starring an ensemble cast led by frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the film is a Buddhist meditation on the human condition, yet also a poignant and comic investigation of the conflict between illusion and reality.

The Southerner

During World War II, Jean Renoir fled Nazi-occupied France for America and tried his hand at making Hollywood films. This period is generally (and unfairly) dismissed as fallow ground in Renoir's career, but even most of his critics agree that The Southerner is not just the best of his five American films, but a fine example of Renoir's humanistic vision. Transplanting the poetic realism of his French masterpieces of the 1930s to the rural American South, Renoir presents a year in the life of a family of migrant workers who decide to follow their dream of farming their own land. Hawk-eyed Zachary Scott gives the performance of his career as the easygoing but determined father who risks everything to give his family something to call their own, with J. Carroll Naish as his bitter, hostile neighbor. The seasonal structure and episodic nature of the film focuses on the hardships the family faces, finding the rhythm of life between setbacks and victories and the soul of his lovingly created characters through their bent but unbowed spirit. Renoir adapted George Perry Sessions's novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand with uncredited help from William Faulkner. This was Renoir's personal favorite of his American films and the only one to enjoy commercial success. --Sean Axmaker

Famed French director Jean Renoir came up with a true slice of Americana in this drama, in which he also helped to write the screenplay, which chronicles a year in the life of a tenant-farmer and his family. Zachary Scott abandoned his usual smooth characterizations to portray the beleaguered man of the land, coping with trying to survive against the problems of farming and a troublesome neighbor. Excellent photography and top performances by all involved make this a special film not to be missed by any classic film buff. Based on George Sessions Perry's novel, Hold Autumn in Your Hand, The Southerner was Renoir's favorite among his American films. The film, though not a huge boxoffice success for United Artists, garnered much critical acclaim and also won the Venice Film Festival's Best Picture Award. Bonus Features: Bonus Two-Reeler Comedy "Baby Daze" with Edgar Kennedy, Scene Selection. Actor Bios. Specs: DVD5; Dolby Digital Mono; 91 minutes; B&W; 1.33:1 Aspect Ratio; MPAA - NR; Year - 1945.

Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection

Long before there were hippies, there was, sublimely, Boudu. In 1932 director Jean Renoir and French star Michel Simon, fresh from their early-sound triumph La Chienne, decided to re-team in adapting a stage farce about a derelict rescued from the river by a bookseller and groomed for bourgeois society. The bookseller's idea proves to be disastrous, though working through all the possibilities for disruption and catastrophe is a slow-gathering and hilarious process. Simon always seemed as much force of nature as mere actor, and his and Renoir's inspiration is to make Boudu the vagabond not a satyr or opportunist or noble savage or de facto sociopolitical anarchist, but simply an oversized manchild with no more guile or conscious agenda than the shaggy dog whose sudden defection led him to throw himself into the Seine. If his insistence on leaving a downy-soft bed to sleep in the hall happens to block the door to the maid's room, where his benefactor Lestingois is wont to sneak after the wife's asleep, well, Boudu doesn't really plan it that way. And if he leaves a wet lugie between the pages of a first-edition Balzac, well, they asked him not to spit on the floor, after all!

We can see that the original farce (by René Fauchois) was probably pretty funny to begin with, but Renoir makes of it much, much more. Boudu Saved from Drowning--arguably the first French New Wave film, nearly 30 years before there was a New Wave--is one of those cardinal works in which we can see, and experience anew, a great filmmaker inventing the cinema. Without jettisoning the formal qualities of the theatrical farce, Renoir opens his film to light, fresh air, and the teeming multifariousness of Parisian street life; the denizens of the city become unwitting extras in the movie as Boudu first shambles, then prances, among them. The deep-focus camerawork is exhilarating, but even the gregarious roughness of the production feels right, indeed essential. "I believe that perfection is even dangerous," Renoir remarked of his own movie. "If a film is perfect, the public has nothing to add.... The audience should always be trying to finish a picture, ... fill in the holes which we didn't fill." Collaborating on Boudu is a glorious experience. --Richard T. Jameson

After well-to-do bookseller Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval) rescues a tramp from a suicidal plunge into the Seine, his family adopts the bum and dedicates itself to reforming him. The irrepressible Boudu (Michel Simon) shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations, challenging the hidebound principles of his hosts and seducing them with his anarchic charm. With Boudu Saved from Drowning, legendary director Jean Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and a brilliant performance by Simon to create an effervescent satire of bourgeois complacency.

La Bete Humaine - Criterion Collection

Based on the classic Emile Zola novel Jean Renoir's La bete humaine was one of the legendary director's greatest popular successes tapping into the fatalism of a nation in despair. Jean Gabin's emblematic portrayal of doomed train engineer Jacques Lantier granted him a permanent place in the hearts of his countrymen. Part poetic realism part film noir the film is a hard-boiled and suspenseful journey into the tormented psyche of a workingman. SPECIAL FEATURES: New restored high-definition digital transfer of the original uncut version. Introduction to the film by Jean Renoir. New interview with director Peter Bogdanovich. Archival interviews with Renoir discussing his adaptation of Emile Zola's novels his process with actors and directing actress Simone Simon. Gallery of on-set photographs and theatrical posters. Theatrical trailer. New and improved English subtitle translation. A booklet featuring writings by film critic Geoffrey O'Brien historian Ginette Vincendeau and production designer Eugene Lourie.System Requirements:Features: New restored high-definition digital transfer of the original uncut version Introduction to the film by Jean Renoir New interview with director Peter Bogdanovich Archival interviews with Renoir discussing his adaptation of Emile Zola's novels his process with actors and directing actress Simone Simon Gallery of on-set photographs and theatrical posters Theatrical trailer New and improved English subtitle translation A booklet featuring writings by film critic Geoffrey O'Brien historian Ginette Vincendeau and production designer Eugene Lourie Running Time 100 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 037429173824 Manufacturer No: BET020

This 1938 adaptation of a rather schematic and melodramatic novel by Émile Zola wasn't a personal project for the writer-director, Jean Renoir, but he made it his own, and it retains the power to shock over 60 years after its original release. This was a star vehicle for working-class hero Jean Gabin that Renoir molded into something pungent and powerful, a story of a curse of brutality that has been handed down in a family from one generation to the next. (The codependent psychology, if not the mood of doomed determinism, may seem more timely than ever.) The working environment of the protagonist, the railroad mechanic Lantier (Gabin), is depicted with great precision; we can just about smell the coal smoke. And the sequences in which Lantier succumbs helplessly to his inherited inclinations are as terrifying as any of the famous murder passages in Hitchcock. For a man with such a high reputation for gentleness and tolerance, the cinema's great humanist was very good at violence: it's worth recalling that almost all of his major and many of his minor films pivot upon vividly imagined brutal crimes. Nothing human was alien to him, not even the pathology of this loathsome "human beast." --David Chute

This Land Is Mine

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: o Spanish (subtitles) o English (Mono) o Spanish (Mono) Synopsis: Written by Dudley Nichols and directed by French expatriate director Jean Renoir, This Land is Mine is one of those "inspirational" wartime dramas... The scene is an unnamed European country, recently overrun by the Nazis (this takes place during a "silent" opening sequence that's the best thing in the film). Charles Laughton plays Albert Lory, a mama's-boy schoolmaster who is the object of his students' ridicule. A craven coward, Lory is held responsible when resistance fighter Paul Martin (Kent Smith), the brother of beauteous teacher Louise Martin (Maureen O'Hara), is executed by the Nazis, though in fact it was Lory's panic-stricken mother (Una O'Connor) who betrayed Paul by informing on him to his friend and collaborator George Lambert (George Sanders). - Arthur Lory is a teacher at a shool in German occupied France. He is a coward, but he is drawn into the actions of the resitance. Arrested by the Germans because of a murder, the German officers promise him freedom, if he is willing to help them traiting France. Special Features: o Biographies o Filmographies o Interactive Menu o Scene Access