Daily bread

In Renoir, that urge exists, too, but an ironic distancing still prevails.We feel we are being shown a story.We feel the intelligence of direction.We detect the irony.In an American movie of that period, those roles would be cast in iron, but in Renoir, we begin to take on the camera`s patient and not unkind neutrality.There is no need for judgment.In life, after all, some things work out untidily, and not at the behest of fate.The film was packed out, and soon duplicated that success in Paris.American methods were avidly imitated.Often so close to poverty that he was driven to sell some of Auguste`s paintings, Renoir at last had a career of his own.He moved forward now with new impetus.Boudu is Renoir`s first masterpiece, though equal ownership belongs to Simon.At Giverny, which lily is the masterpiece?He spies a perfect tramp, Boudu, about to enter the river.He has lost his dog?He is fed up with life?Or is he a natural river rat?If only he had known!Over fifty years later, the story was remade by Paul Mazursky as Down and Out in Beverly Hills.The bum was Nick Nolte now, shabbily glamorous, and a bit of a hippie genius in the end.The openness of Renoir`s film could not survive.There is no river, either.Boudu is an outsider, or so it seems.But Lestingois is every bit as strange and homeless. Yes, he has his house, but he is eccentric, or displaced.What makes the films so ambiguous is the way Renoir`s camera cannot mock them or believe they are wrong.Normality feels all the less likely in their absence.No judgment is called for.No certainty is offered about the proper way to live.The story and particular human hopes are swimming in the river`s flow.A war was to come between Boudu and The River, but nowhere on earth in the early 1930s was anyone delivering such films in which the supple use of the medium, of space and context, could leave a small incident so durable and questioning.Quite simply, Renoir enlarged our sense of human behavior in the way he looked at it, and in the assumption that we were adult enough to make up our own minds.The Lestingois household is tenderly satirized.At one moment, having been given five francs by a child, Boudu thinks to open the car door for a gentleman motorist, dreaming of a tip.There are sets in the film for the interior of the house, but what is more striking is the use of real premises on a quai so that we see the outside framed by the inside.There are beautiful interior shots, of one person in another room, with action involving others in a room behind, joined by an archway or a corridor.That`s what determines that Boudu shall marry the maid.This is asserted in an instant, and it`s a sign of Renoir`s instinct for the daft sweeps of human error.All of this is so vibrantly casual and lifelike.Yet Boudu Sauvé des Eaux is not simply a slice of life.It`s as pretty and organized as a tarte tatin.But foreground and background have been married on the flatness of a screen.Renoir fondly searches out the illusion of depth, but loves the staginess of the screen.He is a vagrant but a dancer, too, a lost being and a found actor.The film is just a lily, but it persuades you to need lilies.And the love is Renoir`s, as he comes into possession of this medium and realizes it is a way of seeing to last a lifetime.It ends up three hours, and the system cuts it to two.Valentine Tessier plays Emma, and she and Jean are very close.Pierre Renoir is Charles.I lack the space to glory in every film.Two young men, Henri and Rodolphe, are staying at the inn, and they fasten on the Dufour women, notably their daughter Henriette.Henri and Henriette have a tryst on the riverbank after he has taken her off in his boat.It is brief but intense.And then, on the sad wings of Joseph Kosma`s music, years later, the lovers meet again for a moment, but then she is called away by her inadequate husband.People do bold things and make mistakes.How can anyone tell which is which?The rest is resignation and the remainder of life.Renoir rejected that expansion, in part because he believed films should find their natural length, as opposed to set commercial forms.And because he felt the sadness was sufficiently conveyed to be left to our imagination.Of course, this is not another version of they lived happily ever after, that keystone of popular cinema.Winds blew and the rain fell, but the mistake in the weather suited the tone of the story.In fact, if anything was left out, the omission adds to the impact of the picture.When the two men throw back the shutters at the inn to reveal Henriette and her mother on swings in the garden, the camera edges forward like a cat seeing a mouse.Renoir was a director who felt this was an essential duty or pleasure in filmmaking.But the river in this film is so much more than radiance.In a longer film, perhaps, Renoir would have had to allow Henri to fall in love with her.What is realistic in the story and the film is the simple, pitiless understanding that this is the way of the world.And for ships that pass in the night, or the day, the river is a facilitating medium, without memory or morality.So the movie needs only one brief reunion to measure the mistake, and the way in which Henriette will never forget it.Renoir had reached fluency by then.Renoir`s camera always indicates a casual human observer who has magically been given privileged vantages.But mastery in film can often push a director toward bigger or more important subjects.It`s not quite that Renoir struggled with that dilemma.The film is a little too tidy or arranged.Erich von Stroheim as von Rauffenstein, commandant of the prison, and a flying ace who has been invalided into this depressing post.He is not a mess, and Renoir`s greatness lies there.He refused to understand why I had not brought some prostitutes of an obviously Viennese type in the scene.My intense admiration for the great man put me in an impossible position.Greed was for me the banner of my profession.As they fought, Renoir wept and said he would give up directing the film!Renoir hoped it would be a good little orthodox film, not a big subject.He added that It was a war film, and yet there is no reference to war. It`s a fascinating distinction, and a reason why in July 1939 the picture unsettled audiences afraid of war.Shot in the La Sologne area in a sunless late winter, La Règle du Jeu is a country house film.La Chesnaye and his wife, Christine, have invited a group of society friends to the country for the weekend.This includes his mistress, Geneviève, and a transatlantic flier, André Jurieu, who blurted out his love for Christine on the radio as he landed at Le Bourget.Another member of this extended family is Octave, everyone`s friend yet an isolated and classless figure.He is played by Renoir himself, limping a little in a shabby raincoat and the battered hat the director preferred.So he is a director on camera as well as off, and palpably the other actors enjoy this game and its theatricality.In addition, Renoir fell in love with his script girl, Dido Freire, so he had a reason for acting.She would become his second wife.Octave has another side to his life.His shifting status takes him below stairs, too, into a romantic intrigue that matches that among the classy people.The gamekeeper, Schumacher, has a wife, Lisette, who is Christine`s maid.Lisette is a flirt, and her eye will fall upon Marceau, a local poacher and thus Schumacher`s worst enemy.The film feels utterly spontaneous, but of course it is carefully contrived.It`s just that liveliness conceals the care.This fatality is foretold in the famous shooting sequence when the house party goes out with their guns to build a funerary pile of birds and rabbits.La Règle du Jeu is graver and funnier than La Grande Illusion.Together, the two films capture the mood of the late 1930s.But changing history is not a reasonable aim for movies.They should be content with helping us to see life.I don`t think that`s the case.Everyone has his reasons.They are like Octave, who hardly know what he wants or how to get it, or like La Chesnaye, who needs boundaries but no fences, who hopes to keep a mistress and a wife.There are two great moments for the film`s La Chesnaye, and for Dalio, who plays the part.He has a new acquisition, an organ with dancing figures, and he offers it to his guests like a show.The mixture of pride and modesty is enchanting.Gentlemen, tomorrow we shall leave the chateau weeping for this wonderful friend, this excellent companion who knew so well how to make us forget that he was a famous man.War was only weeks away.In 1938, Renoir had said his film would be an exact description of the bourgeois of our time.I want to show that every game has its rules.He who breaks them loses the game. But after the war, he realized, I was deeply disturbed by the state of mind of French society and the world in general.The film was attacked.Renoir cut it down from 113 minutes, but it made no difference.He began it, but then Germany struck at Belgium and Holland.He left Tosca to be finished by Carl Koch, and hurried back to Paris.Just before the German invasion Renoir and Dido went to the South of France, and then to Tangier and Lisbon on the way to America.He was perplexed and then dismayed when some in France regarded him as a quitter after the war.These are early modernist films in which the filmmaker realizes he cannot make a movie without admitting it.The director is a presence in the work.Thereafter, Renoir went to live in Los Angeles, in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, on a property he planted with olive trees to remind him of the South of France.He was the son of an inventor and a musician.Neither parent was exactly happy or a success, and neither of them lived after the boy was fifteen.Orson was a large, brilliant, precocious child such as other children hated.He had these parents and an older brother who was of disturbed mind.Richard Welles was ten years in an asylum.He died in 1975 in poverty.It`s hard to offer a diagnosis, but the flights of exhilaration and the slumps in Welles are suggestive.It is if we are prepared to see in Welles one of the cinema`s most heartfelt attempts to find lasting meaning and value.If we want to know whether the movies might be important, then Welles is central and tragic.These range from Bernstein`s recollection of the girl he saw on the ferry one day and has never forgotten, to the mother`s face as she gets ready to send her boy away, to the revelation that Rosebud stands for a lost childhood.Welles drew with skill and flourish.He was an expert and devoted magician.But I`m not sure he believed in a lasting tie in his life.He turned friends into enemies and waited for betrayal.He was a stranger to his own children.He was determined to be out of the ordinary.But one way to start with Citizen Kane is to treat it as a film like any other.In 1941 the American picture business released 379 films.You hear quite generally, still, that it was made on an unprecedented contract.That is relevant, but it exaggerates to claim that Kane was made with more liberty than any other American film.Welles and his associates were invited to make a film of their choice.In return, Welles would be paid $100,000 for writing, directing, producing, and acting in the picture, and he would receive 20 percent of the profits.The Wizard of Oz cost about $2.7 million.In view of all his tasks on the picture, Welles was hardly being greedy.But something often missed in Welles is that he seldom complained about or understood money.He was never quite a film star, but he was a celebrity and a boy wonder, and he was what the studio wanted, ready to deliver in every possible way for a modest salary.So carte blanche does not adequately describe the contract, except in the way it departed from the norm in which a director was hired, given a script and a cast, and moved out before the editing.Beyond that, Schaefer behaved like a prince and a friend.But now study real independence.Selznick allowed the venture to override his business sense and planning.What had been reckoned at first as a picture to be made for under $2 million turned into a $4.25 million expense.Mayer, in return for Clark Gable and cash.In calling for reshoots, in enlarging the script and the running time, Selznick tolerated no discipline.Final cut was always going to be his, unless someone got to his throat first.But Hollywood in that era allowed for this much indulgence and gambling.In 1939 you could have found people who reckoned Welles was more talented than Selznick.In the event, Welles`s first scheme, to do Joseph Conrad`s Heart of Darkness, was set aside, despite a script and a good deal of preproduction work, just because the studio estimated that it might cost $1 million.It was to be a fictional figure, yet based on fact.Welles had the assistance of a Hollywood professional who was getting $500 a week.Years later, in her lengthy essay Raising Kane, Pauline Kael argued that Mankiewicz rescued Welles from uncertainty.The boy had not known what to do, he was being made fun of in the town that resented his special opportunity.So the old pro Mankiewicz had come to his aid.This was mischief on Kael`s part, her urge to be different, and even an early desire to bring Kane to heel, to shake it from its pedestal as the best film ever made. It was also the story fed to her by John Houseman.In the heady New York days of the Mercury Theatre, when it had been doing theatre and radio, Jack Houseman was Welles`s crucial lieutenant and heartfelt admirer.Houseman was the producer and manager who smoothed the way so the genius could do what he wanted.A great affection prompted that alliance in which Houseman believed in Welles`s unique talent and Welles counted on Jack as a forgiving manager.But in Hollywood, in the hiatus as they puzzled over a script, there had been a falling out between the two men at Chasen`s restaurant.But our understanding of the film depends on another connection.That is how Orson was loathed as much as he was revered, for he did not let his talents settle lightly.So if Hearst was one point of reference, out of an adolescent playfulness bound to spell ruin, Orson Welles was the other.And there at the Antelope Inn, ready to steer or help Mankiewicz, was the man who knew Welles better than anyone alive, Jack Houseman.Mankiewicz`s contribution? Welles returned the question Peter Bogdanovich had asked him.It was enormous. He then goes on to give a full, plausible account of how they knocked the idea back and forth to its great advantage.Just as the credit claims, the two men wrote the script together, not always in the same room, but wrestling with the same problems.Look for anything else like Kane in Mankiewicz`s erratic career and you will not find it, whereas Welles would be obsessed with the same themes all his life.More important still, the way Orson talked, breathed, laughed, and lost his temper energized the script.Kane became a great role because it had its essential actor.