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

Returning to what one enjoyed at a much earlier age is often perilous. I was relieved to find that I still enjoy Stendahl's The Red and the Black to take one recent instance. In contrast, I was disappointed by watching Jean Renoir's (1936) "The Crime of Monsieur Lange" again. I remembered being something between charmed and amused by it when I first saw it -- long ago at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. I think that Jean Renoir was a great director, but not as great a one as his reputation suggests. (And wonder if I'd be similarly disappointed were I to watch "Boudu Saved from Drowning" again; the greatness of "The Rules of the Game" I never got; and I was recently underwhelmed by Renoir's version of "The Lower Depths.")

In "M. Lange" Renoir had engaging characters and witty dialogue written by Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), my favorite French poet (Paroles) and the screenwriter of the widely loved (albeit very long!) "Les enfants du Paradis" (Children of Paradise--though it should be "of the Paradise," the Paradise being a theater). I still find some charm, particularly in the character and dialogue provided Valentine (Odette Florelle, a sort of French Ann Sothern; she played Mme. Muskat in "Liliom"), who runs a laundry.

The mousy M. Amédée Lange (René Lefèvre, who also starred in René Clair's anticapitalist comedy "Le Million") writes cowboy fiction, a serial starring Arizona Jim and works for an oily publisher, Batala (Jules Berry), who is in debt, particularly to a dour never-seen moneylender named Meurnier, but also to the simple-minded WWI-veteran concierge (Marcel Lévesque) and to the secretary who is in love with him (Sylvia Bataille) and other women whom he seduced and/or from whom he borrows money.

Batala flees his creditors and is reported dead in a rail accident. The employees, Batala's heir (a disgraced policemen named Baigneur, played by Jacques B. Brunius) and the eager-to-be-liked son of Meurnier (Henri Guisol) agree to turn the publisher into a co-operative and the Arizona Jim serials become a big success.

The business portrayal is mostly fantasy. I would say the crime in the title is, too. The movie opens with Valentine and M. Lange arriving near a border (which one is not specified, but it is Mediterranean, so has to be fascist Italy or Spain at the start of the civil war which installed Franco's fascist regime there -- it is clearly not Nazi Germany!). In an inn/tavern Lange is recognized as a wanted man. While he sleeps, Valentine tells their story.

Plot-spoiler alert

The "crime" is Lange shooting Batala, who changed clothes and ID with a priest who died in the train crash. Batala returns and tells Lange he is going to take over again (and to hell with the staff whom he rarely paid) and get the 200,000 francs for the screen rights to Arizona Jim. Batala smirks that Lange should kill him, but Batala's pistol is still on the desk when Batala walks out.

It is only when Batala puts the moves on Valentine (who regrets having once been seduced by Batala) that Lange shoots him. Although I do not see this as cold-blooded, premeditated murder, I do see it as murder. In effect the tavern-goers along the Mediterranean are a jury and Valentine convinces them that killing the man who was supposedly already dead as "justifiable homicide." She/Prévert/Renoir do not convince me of this. Batala is certainly a reprehensible person, but...

What puzzles me even more than this dubious defense of murder is that Lange would be wanted by the police for murder. The only witness is Valentine, who is with him. They flee the scene of the crime immediately. The gun is Batala's (whether it is with the corpse, I'm not sure -- I am sure that Lange does not take back the money he gave Batala up in the office of the publishing company). How did the police figure out that the dead (apparent-) priest was shot by Lange and get wanted posters to the coast so fast?

I choose to regard the killing as cartoonish, regarding Lange as something like to road-runner dropping an anvil on Wile E. Coyote. Perhaps Lange has been fantasizing too long about the summary justice of Old Arizona?

BTW, Jules Berry also played the character than Jean Gabin shot (with more than a little audience sympathy) in "Le Jour se lève," the pioneering noir that Marcel Carné directed in 1939... from a script by Prévert. And there is something proto-noirish in the reliance on flashback narration in "M. Lange" as well as in the oily villain who is murdered

End plot-spoiler alert

The movie is not entirely set-bound, put the sound cameras available to Renoir in 1936 were unwieldy. The ration of melodrama to comedy in the movie is too high for me, and the "hero" (M. Lange) lacks charisma. The villain (M. Batala) has charisma, oily and selfish and grasping a character as he is. The ludicrous success of the Arizona Jim serial is amusing. The other characters -- the golden-boy bicyclist Charles, (Maurice Baquet), the laundress Batala impregnated, Edith (Sylvia Bataille), the playboy son of the creditor (Henri Guisol) et al. are types from simple-minded fantasies.

In France of the Popular Front of the time, the movie may have provided escapist pleasure (as "Sex in the City" does to some women now and as the superhero franchises do to adolescent boys of all ages -- and Lange's own Arizona Jim serial!). It cannot bear being taken very seriously, and does not look particularly good (I include the state of the mid-1930s film stock as well as the soundstage set). I can see traces of Renoir mise-en-scène and of Prévert wit, but they are not strong enough to overcome my qualms about the de facto trial that frames the extended flashback that is the movie.

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS