“The Crime of Monsieur Lange,” which I discuss in the clip above, was released in France in January, 1936—but it’s important to note that it was made in the fall of 1935, many months before the May, 1936, election of the Popular Front, the government of the united left, led by Léon Blum, which instituted many of the social policies (including paid vacation time for workers) that are still in place in France. Jean Renoir’s film—a frank and hearty drama that culminates in the crime of the title, an act of revolutionary violence by workers against a predatory boss—is both a remarkable forerunner of political changes to come and a sign of stiffening battle lines. Its subject is the founding, in the boss’s absence, of a workers’ cooperative, and the film itself was made by a cooperative, the “October” group of film artists of Communist orientation. (Renoir was sympathetic to the Communist Party, and his next film, “La Vie Est à Nous,” was made expressly as political propaganda, for the Popular Front’s youth organization.) But what’s extraordinary about “The Crime of Monsieur Lange” is that it makes the predatory boss immensely appealing: the actor who plays him, Jules Berry, is a bluff, vigorous, excitingly hot-blooded and good-humored actor, who, Renoir said, improvised most of his lines (and they’re good ones). Here’s what the director said about his politics (as quoted in Pierre Leprohon’s 1971 book about him):
Of course, the environment could, and did, lead to different reactions from different people; the rise of Nazism next door and the rise of Communism farther east were viewed in a variety of ways; Blum’s government, for instance, wanted to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. (Eric Rohmer’s penultimate film, “Triple Agent,” from 2004, captures the ambient political tensions of the time.) But what Renoir makes clear is what’s seen in his films: whatever his point of view, he embodied the ethic he expressed while playing the role of Octave in “The Rules of the Game” (the new DVD release of which I reviewed in the magazine several weeks ago): “The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons.”*
P.S. Monsieur Lange, a low-level publishing-house employee with big pulp-literary dreams (he sits up nights in his grim room concocting a loosely-strung Western series, “Arizona Jim”), is Renoir’s second literary fantasist; the first is from his 1932 comedy “Chotard and Company,” about an aspiring poet who spurns the family business.
*In “The Rules of the Game,” the line “The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons” is spoken by the character Octave, not by the Marquis de la Cheyniest.
