La Petite Marchande d'allumettes represents the first full flowering of a tendency that runs through Renoir's films from 1924 to 1970, a tendency to create an atmosphere of strangeness and unreality, to evoke the quality the French call féerique. Only this one among Renoir's films has that quality throughout; more often, it emerges within a prevailing naturalism to lend a sense of enchantment to a scene. (p. 43)

La Petite Marchande d'allumettes remains at least a lovely fantasy, constructed with delicacy and visual imagination, very nearly maintaining its fairy-tale atmosphere unbroken throughout. (p. 49)

On purge bébé is Renoir's film that comes closest to being a photographed play…. Lines are often spoken with great relish and dramatic flair; we notice the cleverness of a line or the way it is delivered more than its role in the dramatic situation or the interactions it furthers. This dialogue does, of course, characterize; almost all that we know about the characters we learn from what they say and the way they say it. But these characters have no depth. They have life but no lives. (p. 87)

No mere description of the plot of La Nuit du carrefour could capture the character of the film. Its hero is a detective; its genre, ostensibly that of the film policier, usually relies heavily on plot for its effect and treats each incident so as to maximize suspense. Yet in La Nuit du carrefour the working-out of the plot, the solution of the crime, seems almost incidental; rather than foster suspense, Renoir allows Maigret to discover the secrets of the garage before we are even sure there is need to be suspicious. An enumeration of the violent deeds committed makes La Nuit du carrefour sound like an action-packed adventure story; but the film feels languorous rather than violent. (p. 104)

We begin with a murder; at film's end we know, more or less, who committed what crimes. But we hardly feel that all of the confusion has been dispelled, all of the questions answered. Jean Renoir did not see his task as one of undoing and clarifying the mystery, but, rather, one of expressing it, of giving the mystery palpable form. (pp. 106-07)

[The] verbal content of the dialogue turns out not to be very significant; it reveals itself as a conventional element of the ordinary film policier and loses much of its point in a film whose aim is to express the mystery. (p. 111)

La Chienne, La Nuit du carrefour, and Boudu sauvé des eaux form a sort of exploratory trilogy within Renoir's work, an introduction to the possibilities of cinema with sound. Together they constitute a remarkably original group within the realm of French cinema in the early thirties. They are original not only in their independence of the trends and fashions of the day and their development of a style very different from those that were dominant in films of that time, but also in their freedom in almost every domain of cinematic form, their rejection of cliché and easy manipulation of audience emotion, the cool unsentimental objectivity with which they observe their very human characters, whose lives are firmly located within a precisely perceived milieu. (p. 137)

Madame Bovary is the most somber of all Renoir's films of the thirties. It is not visually gray, as The Elusive Corporal will be, but its emotional tone is overwhelmingly dark…. (p. 149)

In Madame Bovary the classical tendencies are stressed, the romantic ones suppressed, creating the most formal of all Renoir films, the most controlled, the least overflowing with movement and life. (p. 162)

What distinguishes Toni from earlier Renoir works is not so much the solidity and vividness of the background, but its persistence as the center of the film; the shift from seeing the group of immigrants arrive to observing the life of one individual among them seems not to take us away from this supporting context but deeper into it. The principal characters do not emerge from the setting but remain wholly within it. But above all, Renoir maintains the social milieu as the real object of his lens through much of Toni by allowing the dialogue to carry the development of the narrative while the images reveal the daily life of the community. (p. 169)

In Madame Bovary Renoir's classical style had placed the action at a distance. In Toni, by embedding the narrative so deeply in the social and physical setting, he draws us into the world of the film. Yet the emphasis on milieu rather than dramatic action lends a sort of impersonality to the narrative, reinforced by enclosing the action within shots of the arrival of a trainload of immigrants—as if it were not the individuality but the universality of these few humans that was being shown. (p. 171)

Toni does hear the stamp of neorealism and, ten years before the liberation of Rome, pointed toward a new cinema. The essence of neorealism is a convincing air of truthfulness at two quite different levels: the truth of the look of a certain environment at a particular time and the truth of a condition of life. (p. 172)

From Toni to The Rules of the Game, every film allows male companionship a significant role, both in the social setting and the narrative, with this camaraderie becoming the central relationship in several films, relegating male-female associations to a secondary place. From this expansion of the social context, these films gain a greater fullness of life; they delve more deeply into a larger range of characters than do the bourgeois films. (p. 176)

In contrast to the bourgeois films, neither duplicity, contempt, nor malice, nor great romantic dreams abound in Toni. They are not wholly absent, but seem incidental rather than the very stuff of life. Instead, sympathy, a sort of gentleness, an intuitive understanding of each other and a great tolerance and willingness to accept what befalls them characterize Toni and Fernand, the major figures among the men at Marie's. (p. 177)

Renoir's deep attachments have always been to people rather than ideologies; significant changes in his work have been influenced by particular persons or specific events rather than by adherence to a political party or program….

Renoir stubbornly refused to be wholly political. Even when most engaged, the focus of his films remains on character rather than polemic or political action. His sympathies are usually apparent; yet even those characters who represent the political views he most opposed are viewed with warmth, as well as a detachment that renders political orientation as one aspect of a human life; Renoir does not cast his human figures in the reductive mold of politics. This helps his films of this time survive their period with almost undiminished impact; one need never have heard of the Popular Front to find Le Crime de M. Lange an absorbing and wholly comprehensible film. (p. 187)

The visual focus of Le Crime de M. Lange is not a person but a place, the courtyard with its surrounding complex of laundry, print-shop, and conciergerie. The life of the film flows through the court; the lives of the characters meet and mingle there. Rather than the isolation of each character within his own illusion, a sense of community and camaraderie pervades this film, with Lange's illusion becoming a reality for the court. (p. 191)

[In Guy de Maupassant's story Une Partie de campagne] the natural setting exists only as background, and a narrator's often condescending voice places every event at a distance. The events are the same in [Renoir's film based on the story], but Renoir has replaced cold observation with a celebration of nature, and the distant impersonal voice with an affectionate eye. As always, literary material has been a source for ideas, not a model to be scrupulously followed. But here the mere passage of time may have been instrumental to the change. Maupassant, writing a contemporary tale, could view with a cynical gaze the follies of his world; we, from our lives set in the murderous twentieth century, see 1860 as a more tranquil era when time moved at a gentler pace and the sweetness of life could be tasted in simple days marked by simple joys.

How much of the charm of Renoir's film lies in the way it evokes this feeling! And how much of the feeling depends upon nature having been brought into the foreground of the tale! (pp. 237-38)

With all their captivating shimmer of indefinite forms, almost every impressionistic image of Une Partie de campagne affirms that Jean Renoir's deepest pictorial debt to his father is compositional; repeatedly, the crossed diagonals of composition create a dynamic tension and movement within soft-textured images of verdure and gently undulant water reflecting bright sky. Thus Jean Renoir carries to the level of sheer form the theme of vibrant and powerful forces underlying nature's summer skin.

And thus the impressionistic moments may mislead us—if we are to be more than impressionistic in our account. For, important as they are in establishing the tone, the atmosphere, the appearance of the world of the film, they convey only a part of its reality. (p. 239)

If "impressionism" implies a concern only with ephemeral appearance, the mere capture of a transient moment in all its transience, then Renoir as film-maker and Une Partie de campagne as film are more than impressionistic. The transient moments occur, right enough, more feelingly perceived than by any other director of the thirties, but Renoir seldom reveals mere transience. Rather, almost every such fleeting impression in a Renoir film either appears as a contrast illuminating some intransigent, intransigent reality of character or soon acquires depth through our growing awareness of its role in shaping these very human lives….

Yet in this film the surfaces so catch our eye, surfaces of both nature and character, that we may easily fail to see anything else at all. (p. 240)

[The] image of calm liquid beauty with which Une Partie de campagne ends does not merely mock the self-pitying sentimentality of Henri and Henriette. Though ironic and unhappy, the ending is not hopeless, as it is not hopeful—life and the river persist; one may stagnate or move with the flow and be renewed. (p. 256)

[Once] we cease looking for Gorky, Les Bas Fonds reveals itself as a Renoir film. The unevenness remains, but now may be felt as Gorky impeding the development of a Renoir theme, rather than as Renoir betraying Gorky. For almost all of Renoir's departures from [Gorky's play The Lower Depths] bring Les Bas Fonds closer to the preceding Renoir films. The central theme of two lives coming together, then parting, echoes Boudu, where, too, circumstances bring one character to give up his form of life and come to share a very different life with another…. (p. 260)

[The] success of La Grande Illusion, like the failure of a La Règle du jeu, two years later, seems detached from at least some of its intentions, and due perhaps more to its hopeful tone, the depth of human sympathy expressed, and the quality of its performances than to any general acceptance or even recognition of a pacifist theme. For, like every other Renoir film, it fits only awkwardly the categories it tempts us to assign. A war film, as the New York Times reviewer called it? An escape story? A pacifist film? Yes—and no.

The war lurks there somewhere, of course; almost every frame acknowledges its existence. And yet … no trenches, no mud, no exploding shells. Idle heroes and no villains—especially no villains…. The protagonists, who begin as combatants, are reduced—or elevated—to being mere men. Still, on another, deeper plane the film reverses this movement; the war grows ever closer until the final scene thrusts it to the foreground again, calling the whole hopeful development of the film into question.

This physical distance from battle deprives Renoir's pacifism of its clichés. Many antiwar films make their plea by providing a surfeit of the horrors of war; Renoir's does not. Nor does he win our allegiance to peace with thrilling combat scenes. As James Kerans has said [see excerpt above], he does not fight the war for peace. Rather, he provides some glimpses of brave and honorable men—citizens, soldiers—interacting within the vague ambiance of the conflict, leaving us to find and feel in this display of life the futility and wastefulness of war. (pp. 287-88)

In its use of language La Grande Illusion may still remain unique, being not merely a multilingual film, but one in which language becomes a major dimension of subject matter. Beyond being a mere element in Renoir's search for truth, his insistence that each character speak his own tongue proves essential to a central theme: the role of language in human affairs. (pp. 319-20)

Among the facts that most interest Renoir is that love can transcend the barriers of language. And repeatedly, late in the film, he employs the most divisive aspects of language—the fact that different languages are different and mutually unintelligible, and the fact that a common language may be used to create barriers rather than destroy them—to express the closest ties developed in the film. (pp. 320-21)

The first image of La Grande Illusion is of a phonograph record, the last, of a field buried in snow. Tone changes from black to white; perspective, from close-up to extreme long shot; movement, from a spinning in place to the slow forward progress of two men moving together. These changes might be seen as symbolic of the distance covered in the film, in the life of its hero, in the world portrayed. And the greatest illusion may be that it cannot be, that we must forever spin in place, that this is merely a hopeful dream from a world long dead. (p. 322)

La Marseillaise is a film of ideas, with a continuity of ideas more than of actions, and each early scene both shows developing events and reveals the currents of thought which swept France toward the First Republic. (p. 326)

The opening scene of La Marseillaise reflects Renoir's approach to history—authentic and revealing in its details, reticent in its statement, refusing to reproduce that which we most expect. (p. 327)

La Marseillaise is the noisiest of Renoir films, full of crowd and battle noises, with a greater density and volume of sound and much more external music than any other Renoir film of the period…. [The] rich pattern of sound in La Marseillaise contains a collage of French accents, including even the German of Alsace, with this variety of voices then forming a kind of commentary on the diversity of peoples who joined to make the Revolution. The identification of the transitional drumbeat as the sound of the revolutionary army approaching Valmy then completes this pattern of sounds which are both internal and external, both elements within the overlapping worlds of French history and La Marseillaise and a commentary on their events. (pp. 349-50)

In its dark tone, its pessimistic mood, its air of fatality, La Bête humaine differs from every other Renoir film of the thirties…. [The] darkness of La Bête humaine may reflect Renoir's reaction to the debacle of European politics. (pp. 354-55)

In the environment and activities of the railroad, Renoir found a world of work and achievement that transcended the narrow circle of the doomed, a sort of second foreground for the film in which a sane and hopeful worker's milieu provides a contrast to the madness that overwhelms the central characters. (p. 356)

La Bête humaine became the occasion for another polar swing in Renoir's work—not only from light to dark, complex to simple, but more importantly from a film of ideas to a film of action. In both La Grande Illusion and La Marseillaise articulate characters discuss their situation rationally, see themselves with some objectivity, and act in ways that reflect the ideas they hold. In contrast, La Bête humaine becomes in Renoir's hands a film without ideas, where the actions have no rational basis but simply surge forth from some dark interior well…. Renoir's La Bête humaine is a tragedy, not an exposé. (p. 357)

Some critics see La Règle du jeu as part of a trilogy with La Marseillaise and La Grande Illusion. If so, then La Règle du jeu too is an historical film, though set in the present, being the final strand of a thread perceived in French history from 1789 to 1939. The thread is the relation of classes, and the substance of the trilogy is the transformation of the French middle class from revolutionaries to parasites. (p. 388)

[The] uniqueness of his films had always lain in their interplay of form and character, in the vitality of the characters these forms revealed, and in the critical light these creations cast upon our troubled world. In these works he had repeatedly used accidental conjunctions as occasions for the exercise of choice, converting dramatic contrivance into the most convincing characterization. Now, in the most complex work he had yet devised, he sought to express the state of mind of 1939 in a clockwork comic structure with cogs of character and chance. (p. 408)

Of the eight major characters in La Règle du jeu, six are absent from the final ceremony. Those present, Robert and Schumacher, are performers, not observers, of the rite whose function does not serve their double set of dancers but the class that assimilates them all, the masters by membership, the servants by adherence. The deed is done, the marauders repelled, Christine returned to the fold; the rite confirms the rule that rules them all, the sacrifice of reality to appearance, and thus reaffirms the rightness of their lives.

If "reality" is real, then appearance must accommodate it, else it will not present itself as appearance but as fantasy. The tales we tell, the games we play, if they will convince us, must take up those shreds of reality we can't avoid. The game of love and death disguises them to conform to the image that the world, and we, mistake for self. (pp. 410-12)

An inability to perceive the dissonance of one's own actions is pervasive in La Règle du jeu and in the world it portrays—if we acknowledge the volcano, we might stop dancing. (p. 425)

In almost every respect, the style of La Règle du jeu is simply a perfection and extension of that which Renoir had been developing since Tire au flanc. (p. 438)

Alexander Sesonske, in his Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924–1939 (copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; excerpted by permission), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980, 463 p.