Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Jean Renoir and his scriptwriter, Jacques Prévert, explore, via The Crime of Monsieur Lange, whether there are circumstances when murder is morally justifiable, presenting an object case for examination. For the case presented, they've come to the wrong conclusion, in my opinion. As humanists, they ought to know better!

Historical Background: Jean Renoir (1894-1979) had adapted well to the advent of sound, directing such notable gems as La Chienne (1931) and Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). His 1934 adaptation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary met with mixed reviews and Toni (1935), though now admired, was not well received at the time. Renoir's next film, The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) (Le Crime de M. Lange in French) marked the opening volley of a new phase in Renoir career. Social consciousness would become the hallmark of Renoir's work through the rest of the thirties, during which time he would produce his most famous films, Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête humaine (1938), and The Rules of the Game (1939). Renoir's political proclivities leaned well left of center. During this time, he even produced and directed a propaganda film for the French Communist Party, The People of France (1936), though he was not himself a member of that party.

For The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Renoir teamed up with Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), one of the greatest French screenwriters and poets of his generation. In fact, Prévert was arguably the greatest French writer from roughly the mid-thirties through the mid-forties. Prévert teamed repeatedly with Marcel Carné, for such scripts as Port of Shadows (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939), Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942), and Children of Paradise (1945), but in 1936, it was Renoir who acquired his services. More precisely, Renoir shared Prévert's services in 1936, since it was the same year in which Prévert wrote the script for Jenny (1936), for Carné. Jules Berry, who plays Batala in The Crime of Monsieur Lange later played the devil in Les Visiteurs du Soir, and it is easy to see the later of these roles as an outgrowth of the other.

The Story: A car arrives at a rustic inn, the Frontier Café and Hotel, in a remote northern French border town. The driver, the affable Meunier (Henri Guisol), bids a fond farewell to his two passengers, mild-mannered Amédée Lange (René Lefèvre) and his lively blond companion, Valentine (Odette Florelle). They check in at the desk and quietly retire to their room. Soon, there is animated conversation among the guests seated in the lounge. One of them is convinced that the man who just checked in, Lange, is the murderer depicted in a police profile passed around moments earlier by the local constabulary. He wants to inform the police of Lange's presence at the inn, but a lively debate ensues. From her room, Valentine overhears the discussion, while Lange sleeps. She emerges and begins to recount the circumstances of the murder, suggesting that the patrons can then decide whether or not to turn Lange over to the police. The patrons of the inn become a kind of informal jury of Lange's peers.

The flashback reveals Lange as a somewhat meek employee of a Parisian publishing company owned by the unscrupulous Monsieur Batala (Jules Berry). Lange has a rich imagination, at least, and spends his evenings writing pulp westerns featuring a heroic character, "Arizona Jim." Batala is in financial straights, mainly due to living beyond his means and poor decisions in his selection of materials to publish. He is heavily indebted to a Monsieur Meunier, as Meunier's attorney, Mr. Buisson, is quick to remind him. He has also defrauded Mr. Baigneur (Jacques B. Brunius), having failed to deliver three "uplifting books" (to be entitled "They Shall Not Pass," "Hymn to Work," and "Whither Are We Drifting?"), each of which was to include plugs for pharmaceuticals sold by Baigneur (Flaconnet powder and Ranimex pills). Batala does his best to hold his creditors and disaffected clients at bay. Having recently learned that Lange writes novels, he introduces Lange as a promising new talent to Baigneur and promises to deliver the required pharmaceutical plugs in the context of Lange's novels. Lange is pleasantly surprised to learn that Batala wants to publish his works, in serial manner. Batala neglects to inform Lange about the required product insertions. Batala also tricks Lange into signing away the rights to his work.

Among Batala's other despicable behaviors are incessant efforts to seduce any and all young ladies that he encounters. He has an on-going relationship with a woman of the office named Edith (Sylvia Bataille), but mistreats her and even, at one point, sends her off to prostitute herself for Mr. Buisson, hoping to delay Buisson's court action. Batala was previously involved with the laundress, Valentine, and pressures her for more, but she is onto his game at this point. His latest target is the pretty, dark-haired Estelle (Nadia Sibirskaïa), another laundress, who is too flirtatious for her own good. She has a romance going with Charles (Maurice Baquet), the son of The Concierge couple (Marcel Lévesque and Odette Talazac), goes on a date with Lange, and is later seduced and impregnated by Batala.

A cousin (Sylvain Itkine) of Batala shows up hoping for a job. He's a retired inspector and Batala doesn't recognize him as a relative. Fearing that the police have come to arrest him for his fraudulent activities, Batala skips town on the next train. On board, he gets into conversation with a priest, shortly before the train, the Verneuil Express, derails near Versigny, killing many of those on-board. Batala is reported among the casualties.

The employees of Batala's publishing house discuss what is to be done. With the concurrence of Meunier's liberal son (Henri Guisol), as the principal debt holder, they decide to form a collective and continue to operate the business. Thanks to the splendid success of Lange's "Arizona Jim" series, business is picking up pretty well. Batala's cousin, the nominal heir, is delighted with the notion of the collective, provided there's a job somewhere for him. Estelle, who is pregnant with Batala's child, is reunited with the devoted Charles, who will happily marry her, despite her condition. All is bliss in this brave new socialist world!

All is bliss, that is, until Batala suddenly turns up, still quite alive. He had ingeniously switched clothing and identity papers with the priest killed in the train wreck. He thereby got the creditors off his back while also finding that a priest's suit provided suitable cover for operating his cons with impunity. He's back, however, and with business booming, thanks to the hard work of the employees, he wants his cut – and his cut, as he reckons it, is everything. Typical fat capitalist pig – according to Renoir and Prévert. After dismissing Lange's objections, Batala heads out into the alleyway, where he encounters Valentine. He drags her into the shadows at the edge of the alley, hoping to seduce her, as Lange looks on from a window overhead. The combination of Batala's avarice and his advances on Valentine are more than Lange can bear. He rushes into the alley and shoots Batala – like Arizona Jim coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress. Lange then heads off with Valentine and the young Monsieur Meunier toward the border inn where the film opened. All that remains, in the film's final framing segment, is for viewers to discover the judgment of the inn's patrons.

Themes: The theme, here, is the exploitation of the working class by greedy and otherwise immoral capitalist swine. The eponymous murder of Batala by Monsieur Lange is being effectively tried before his peers, but what's really on trial is capitalist exploitation. Valentine provides the role of the defense attorney for Lange (or the prosecutor of capitalist exploitation). Apparently, this simple laundress missed her calling as an attorney. The subsidiary theme is the notion of a Utopian worker friendly society in which business are operated by worker collectives. Never mind, that someone still has to establish the wage scale, identify the relative worth of the various employees, fire nonproductive workers, and keep the business competitive. Never mind that there will be the same potential for dishonesty and embezzlement, whether the person charged with financial management arises from a collective or has started the business via capitalist investment.

Renoir belonged, at the time this film was made, to an anti-capitalist group, called the Popular Front, which advocated collective ownership. Collectives can exist within the capitalist system anytime someone wants to put one together. There is nothing about the capitalist system that precludes any group of people, workers or otherwise, from pooling resources or borrowing capital and starting a new business. Collectives, however, will still present the potential for abuses by whomever manages the business. The answer to capitalist exploitation, in my judgment, lies in checks and balances and effective regulatory controls that limit potential for abuses, rather than elimination of capitalism (which has thus far proven to be the most productive economic system). Unfortunately, in America, the checks and balances that exist are inadequate, presently, because the capitalist interests control the government, rather than the other way around. What I advocate as an economic system is a restrained capitalist system effectively regulated to serve the collective interests of the people.

Production Values: The screenplay for The Crime of Monsieur Lange was written by the great Jacques Prévert. As in all of Prévert's work, the dialog is both witty and believable and the story progresses with excellent pace and economy. Most of the story transpires in an extended flashback, framed by scenes at an inn on the border, which amount to a debate on the morality of what occurred during the flashback. Although we take such film structures for granted today, it was an unusual narrative tactic for 1936. Prévert provided a script that gracefully interweaves a variety of subplots in complex ways while effectively exploring such issues as community vs. exploitation and fantasy vs. the reality of everyday life.

Unfortunately, the basic premise of the story is so badly flawed as to be fatal to the film. Renoir and Prévert have indulged themselves in extravagances of socialist propaganda. It is the kind of leftist sentimental nonsense that is embarrassing to those of us who support leftist political agendas while trying to maintain a semblance of rationality. In order for this story to make sense, viewers have to accept several absurd notions. (1) Businessmen are typically seducers and swindlers who cheat their employees. (2) Summary capital punishment is a just penalty for seducers and swindlers. (3) In a business run as a collective, there will be no need for any one person or group of persons to make difficult business decisions. All the workers will be happy. (4) The sensible and morally just way for a group of skilled employees to establish a business that operates for their mutual benefit is to kill the unscrupulous owner of an existing business. There's plenty of enjoyment to be taken from this film in relation to the fine performances and charming interpersonal interactions, but it's all at the service of a lot of blarney.

As usual, Renoir's mise-en-scene is something special. Most of the film transpires in a set composed of an apartment building and the upstairs publishing firm owned by Monsieur Batala. There are a few interludes on the streets of Paris as well as the framing scenes on the northern French border. The camera movements are fluid, adding to the lyrical quality of the script. Renoir uses a creative ripped paper kind of transition between the scene in which Batala seduces Estelle and Lange's visit with the bedridden Charles, to symbolically represent the rending of the romance between Estelle and Charles, by Estelle's folly with Batala. There is one remarkable bit of ingenious camerawork, near the end of the film, during the climatic scene, which is rightfully famous and revered. The camera fluidly follows the developing action at ground level and on the second story above, while completing a 360-degree unbroken pan around the alleyway! I encountered a detailed schematic of the layout for this particular shot in a French review of this film, which gives you an idea of the awe in which this bit of technical wizardry is held.

Renoir assembled a worthy cast for this film. René Lefèvre does a nice job in a not too difficult part as the somewhat timid character, Lange. He is otherwise best known for a role in The Million (1931). Odette Florelle is sexy and endearing as Valentine. She sings a lovely song three-quarters of the way through the film. Jules Berry, as the villain, steals the show. He made a career out of villainous roles in such films as Le Jour se lève (1939) and Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942). I also liked Sylvia Bataille as Edith. She later appeared in Ways of Love (1950).

Bottom-Line: The bottom-line for me is that this film promotes a view of "justice" that I cannot support. As I see it, a murderer, no matter how mild-mannered or agreeable, is more morally culpable than a fraud and womanizer, no matter how disagreeable. Perhaps what's at work here in judging The Crime of Monsieur Lange is the same distinctly French sensibility that finds justice in beheading, during the reign of terror, 17,000 people insufficiently enthusiastic about the French Republic. Renoir and Prévert are ignoring the issue of proportionality in their notion of rough justice. The film's production values are very good, but, as I've said before, a wrong-minded premise is fatal to a film, from my perspective. The Crime if Monsieur Lange is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of about 84 minutes.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age