Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir (
September 15,
1894 –
February 12,
1979), born in the
Montmartre district of
Paris,
France, was a
film director, actor and author. He was the second son of Aline Victorine Charigot and the French painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was also the brother of
Pierre Renoir, a noted stage and film actor and director of the Comedie Francaise; the uncle of
Claude Renoir, a cinematographer; and the father of
Alain Renoir, a professor of comparative literature at the
University of California at Berkeley.
As a film director and actor he made over forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father,
Renoir My Father (1962).
When Jean Renoir was a child he moved with his family to the south of France. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. As a young man, his father's financial success ensured that Jean was educated at fashionable boarding schools which, Jean later wrote, he was continually running away from. "Elegant prisons," he later called them.
At the outbreak of
World War I Jean was serving in the cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot. His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to discover the cinema, where he used to recuperate with his leg elevated while watching the films of Charlot (as
Charlie Chaplin was known in
France) and others, only discovering Chaplin's actual name some years later. After the war, Renoir adopted his father's suggestion and tried his hand at making ceramics, but he soon set aside ceramics in order to make films.
This happened around the time he discovered the films of
Erich von Stroheim. It was Stroheim's films, Renoir later wrote, that made him realize that the creation of a film is the creation of the world within that film, and that good films could be made in France depicting French subjects in French surroundings, something he had previously not thought possible. He began to make a study of French gesture in his father's and others' paintings, gesture which he believed had enormous plastic value for the cinema.
In 1924, Renoir directed the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, who was also his father's last model, Catherine Hessling. At this stage his films did not produce a return, and Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.
During the 1930's Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In
1931 Renoir directed his first sound film
La Chienne, and the following year
Boudu Saved from Drowning (originally
Boudu sauvé des eaux) was strongly influenced by Chaplin's tramp. Here
Michel Simon, the vagrant, is rescued from the
River Seine by a bookseller, and the materialist bourgeois millieu of the bookseller and his family is contrasted with the attitudes of the tramp, who is invited to stay at their home.
By the middle of the decade Renoir was associated with the Popular Front; several of his films such as
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange reflected the movement's politics. In 1937 he made one of his most well-known masterpieces,
La Grande Illusion starring
Erich von Stroheim and the immensely popular
Jean Gabin. A pacificist film about a series of escape attempts by French POW's during World War I, the film was enormously successful but was also banned in
Germany by the
Nazi propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels. It was also later banned in
Italy by
Mussolini after having won the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award at the
Venice Film Festival. This was followed by another cinematic success:
La Bête Humaine (
The Human Beast), a film noir tragedy based on the novel by
Emile Zola and starring
Simone Simon and
Jean Gabin.
In 1939, now able to finance his own films, Renoir made what is regarded widely as his greatest film, as well as one of the greatest ever made,
La Règle du Jeu (
The Rules of the Game), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast. Renoir himself played the character Octave, a sort of master of ceremonies in the film. The film was greeted with derision by Parisian audiences upon its premiere and was extensively reedited by Renoir, but without success. It was his greatest commercial failure. The Vichy government later banned the film as demoralizing and during the war the original negative of the film was lost. It was not until the 1950's that two French film enthusiasts, with Renoir's cooperation, were able to reconstruct a complete print of the film.
When
World War II came, the 45-year-old Renoir was drafted into the Film Service of the French army. With the German invasion and Occupation of May 1940, he fled France with his second wife Dido, worked briefly in Italy, and then moved to the
United States where he made films in
Hollywood, California. Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him in the United States. In 1943, he produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France:
This Land Is Mine, starring
Maureen O'Hara and
Charles Laughton. Two years later he made
The Southerner, a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best work in America and one for which he was nominated for an
Academy Award for Directing. In 1946, Renoir became a
naturalized citizen of the United States. In that year he made
Diary of a Chambermaid, an adaptation of the
Octave Mirbeau novel starring
Paulette Goddard and
Burgess Meredith.
The Woman on the Beach (1947) starring
Joan Bennett and
Robert Ryan was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California. Both films were poorly received and were the last films Renoir made in America.
In 1949 Renoir traveled to India and made
The River, his first color film. Based on the novel of the same name by
Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and the sensitive story of three young girls coming of age in colonial India. The film won the International Prize at
Cannes in 1951 and marked the beginning of the second great creative period of Renoir's career.
After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of technicolor musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce,
Le Carrosse d'or (
The Golden Coach) (1953) with
Anna Magnani,
French CanCan with
Jean Gabin and
Maria Felix (1954) and
Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men) with
Ingrid Bergman and
Jean Marais (1956). During the same period Renoir produced in Paris the
Clifford Odets play,
The Big Knife, and wrote and produced in Paris for
Leslie Caron his own play
Orvet.
Renoir's next films were made in 1959 using techniques Renoir admired and adapted from live television at the time.
Le Déjeûner sur l'herbe (
Picnic on the Grass), starring
Paul Meurisse, and
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (
The Testament of Doctor Cordelier) with
Jean Louis Barrault focused on the dangers Renoir saw in the overdevelopment of the human rational faculty at the expense of the education of the senses and emotions. The former was filmed on the grounds of Auguste Renoir's home in
Cagnes-sur-Mer and the latter film was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.
In 1962 Renoir made what was to be his penultimate film,
Le Caporal épinglé (
The Elusive Corporal) with
Jean Pierre Cassel and
Claude Brasseur. Set among French POW's during their massive internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II, the film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other. Renoir believed it was his saddest film.
In 1962, Jean Renoir published a loving memoir of his father titled
Renoir, My Father, in which he described the profound influence his father had on him and his work. As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays and then wrote a novel,
The Notebooks of Captain Georges, published in 1966.
Captain Georges is the nostalgic account of an aristocrat's sentimental education and love for a peasant girl. The book continues the same theme explored earlier in the films
Diary of a Chambermaid and
Picnic on the Grass.
Renoir made his last film in 1969,
Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (
The Little Theater of Jean Renoir). In sympathy with the student demonstrations at the time, Renoir's original title for the film was
It's a Revolution! The film is a series of four short films made in a variety of styles with one unifying theme, in Renoir's words, "The pitcher goes so often to the well that eventually it breaks."
Thereafter, unable to find financing for his films and in declining health, Renoir spent the last years of his life receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills and writing novels and his memoirs.
In
1973 Renoir was preparing a production of his stage play
Carola with
Leslie Caron and
Mel Ferrer when he fell ill and was unable to direct. The producer
Norman Lloyd, a friend and actor in
The Southerner, took over the direction of the play.
|
The young Jean Renoir with Gabrielle Renard in a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. |
His memoirs, titled
My Life and My Films, were published in 1974. In "My Life and My Films" Renoir wrote about the influence exercised upon him by his cousin
Gabrielle Renard, the woman seen here in the portrait by his father. Shortly before his birth, Gabrielle came to live with the Renoir family in order to help raise Jean. It was she who introduced him to the
Guignol puppet shows in the
Montmartre of his childhood. "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes," he wrote. He concluded his memoirs with the words he had often spoken as a child, "Wait for me, Gabrielle."
In 1975 he received an
Academy Award for his lifetime contribution to the motion picture industry and that same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in
London. In 1977, the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the
Legion of Honor.
Jean Renoir died in
Beverly Hills, California on
February 12,
1979. His body was returned to France to be buried beside his family in the cemetery at
Essoyes,
Aube,
France.
Jean Renoir has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd. Several of his ceramics were collected by
Dr. Albert Barnes and can be found on display beneath his father's paintings at the
Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.
Silent Films
La Fille de l'eau (1924)
Nana (1926)
(Sur un air de) Charleston (1927)
Marquitta (1927)
La Petite marchande d'allumettes (
The Little Match Girl) (1928)
Tire au flanc (1928)
Le Tournoi (dans la cité) (1928)
Le Bled (1929)
On Purge bébé (1931)
Early Sound Era
La Chienne (
The Bitch) (1931)
La Nuit du carrefour (
Night at the Crossroads) (1932)
Boudu sauvé des eaux (
Boudu Saved from Drowning) (1932)
Chotard et Cie (
Chotard & Co.) (1933)
Madame Bovary (1933)
Toni (1934)
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936)
La Vie est à nous (
Life Belongs to Us/People of France) (1936)
Une Partie de campagne (
A Day in the Country) (1936/1946)
Les Bas-fonds (
The Lower Depths) (1936)
La Grande illusion (1937)
La Marseillaise (1938)
La Bête humaine (
The Human Beast) (1938)
La Règle du Jeu (
The Rules of the Game) (1939/1959)
American Period
Swamp Water (1941)
This Land is Mine (1943)
Salute to France (1944)
The Southerner (1945)
The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946)
The Woman on the Beach (1947)
The River (1951)
Return to France
Le Carrosse d'or (
The Golden Coach) (1953)
French Cancan (1955)
Eléna et les hommes (
Elena and Her Men) (1956)
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959)
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (
Picnic on the Grass) (1959)
Le Caporal épinglé (
The Elusive Corporal) (1962)
Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969)
*
Grand Illusion & The River*
Senses of Cinema: Jean Renoir*
Jean Renoir at FilmReference.com
