La Chienne (1931) was one of the first great films of the sound era. "Chienne" means essentially "bitch," which could apply with equal aptness to either of the two principal women in this film, though the term's use in the film's title is clearly in reference to Lucienne, not Adele. The male characters in this film are no less contemptible, each in his own way, yet the main protagonist steals from us a degree of compassion and sympathy that we probably should not surrender. That, I think, is what Renoir intends for us to better understand.

Historical Background: Jean Renoir (1894-1979) was born in Paris, the second son of the great impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. His older brother, Pierre, grew up to become an actor and one of his nephews, Claude, later became a cinematographer. Jean was destined to make film history as a director and producer. Not surprisingly, he grew up in a highly cultured environment at home and in the galleries, theaters, and coffeehouses that he had opportunity to frequent. Renoir fought in World War I and received an injury that left him with a permanent limp as well as a highly jaundiced view toward war in general. By the end of World War I, Jean was back home attending his ailing father and falling in love with one of his models, Andrée Heuchling, who later turned to acting under the screen name of Catherine Hessling. Renoir married her in 1920.

Renoir's artistic inclinations first turned to the making of pottery, but he gradually fell in love with cinema and he was able to set up his own production company with the inheritance he received after his father's death. He wrote the script for his company's first film, produced in 1924, directed by Albert Dieudonné. With little more than the knowledge he acquired from observing that one picture being made, he then directed his own debut film, La Fille de l"Eau (1925), starring his wife. For his second film, Renoir undertook an adaptation of Emile Zola's Nana (1926). With a budget of one million francs, it was the most expensive film made up to that time. It was well received by critics but bombed so badly at the box-office that the financial loss almost sunk Renoir's production company right then and there. He had to borrow money for his third film, Charleston-Parade (1927), which was a scandalous erotic dance fantasy featuring Hessling. Renoir made a few other silent films featuring Hessling, but the advent of sound technology at the end of the twenties coincided with Renoir's separation from Hessling. Renoir then began a long-term relationship with film editor Marguerite Mathieu and although the two never formally married, she took and retained the name Marguerite Renoir throughout the remainder of her career.

As the sound era approached, Renoir had acquired a reputation as a capable director but had yet to score a single commercial success. He was able to overcome that limitation with his first talkie, On purge Bébé (1931), which was a short domestic drama. That success set the stage for his first great film, La Chienne (1931), because it enabled him to reassert full creative control over his effort. La Chienne was Renoir's first full-length feature film in sound and helped to launch a brilliant period in French cinema that lasted throughout the thirties, when many of the foremost innovations in the fledgling seventh art were Gallic. La Chienne was so revolutionary in its risqué and caustic quality, in fact, that it was banned in many countries and didn't reach America or Britain in a subtitled version until 1975.

The Story: The film opens with a shot of a puppet theater, where three hand puppets compete successively for the role of master of ceremonies. Finally, one of the three clubs the other two before intoning, "This is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. It proves no moral at all. It's simply another story about He and She and The Other Guy." It's the age-old story of a romantic triangle, jealousy, and tragedy. We are next introduced to the three principals. He is Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), a mild-mannered cashier, neither handsome nor personable, and badly henpecked by his wife, Adele (Magdeleine Bérubet). She is Lucienne "Lulu" Pelletier (Janie Marese), a pretty young prostitute, and The Other Guy is Andre "Dédé" Govain (Georges Flamant), her pimp and an all-around ne'er-do-well and lowlife. Maurice is a stuffy accountant whose one pastime is painting on Sundays, his day off. His wife Adele had been previously married to a Sergeant Alexis Godard (Roger Gaillard), who was supposedly killed during the war. The shrewish woman continuously berates Maurice and compares him adversely to her first husband, who, she says, was a "real man." She keeps tight control on the purse strings, providing Maurice with only a small allowance from his own salary. She also complains about his paintings being strewn about their apartment.

One evening, returning from a gathering with his fellow employees, Maurice encounters Lucienne being beaten by her pimp, Dédé, for not having earned enough cash that day to finance his gambling and other needs. Maurice intervenes and easily knocks the semi-intoxicated Dédé to the ground. Lucienne is more concerned, however, with her pimp's welfare than with being rescued. Maurice arranges for a taxi to take the pair home and Dédé quickly anticipates that Maurice can be turned into a regular source of income.

Lucienne easily seduces Maurice and she soon has herself set up in a love-nest under his sponsorship. The secret apartment also becomes a storage site for Maurice's painting, which Adele had threatened to turn over to the junkman. Lucienne secretly continues to see Dédé and he, in turn, continues to demand money from her. Lulu enjoys showing off her news digs to her friend Yvonne (Mlle Doryans), what with its running water, tub, and other "conveniences." Maurine is desperately in love with Lucienne, but she merely strings him along.

Dédé starts eying Maurice's paintings as another potential source for quick money. He passes Lulu off as the artist and establishes an arrangement with an art dealer, Wallstein (Lucien Mancini). By chance, Maurice comes across a couple of his paintings on display in a gallery window and is pleasantly surprised by how much they are fetching. Lulu reminds him that he had given them to her as gifts and explains that she had decided to sell a few to raise some money.

Maurice is understandably surprised one day to meet Adele's first husband, Alexis, in the flesh, as he had been led to believe the man dead. Alexis, it turns out, had been so desperate to divest himself of his wife that he had changed identities with a dead man while serving his time in a German POW camp. He now hopes to extort money from Maurice, either for reappearing or for not reappearing, it makes little difference. Maurice shrewdly manipulates the situation by inviting Alexis to rob Adele's savings, suggesting a time when he and Adele will supposedly be out. He then arranges for Alexis to be discovered by Adele, in the presence of witnesses, and thus divests himself of Adele altogether, reuniting her with her highly reluctant previous spouse.

Maurice now anticipates blissful coexistence with his beloved Lulu, but when he arrives with the "good news" that he is now free to live with her, he finds her in bed with Dédé. After Dédé leaves, Maurice confronts Lulu, but there's little she can say, under the circumstances, other than to disabuse Maurice of his notion that she could ever really care for anyone so old and ugly.

SPOILERS AHEAD. SKIP TO THEMES SECTION TO AVOID.

Maurice becomes incensed by her mocking laughter about his naïve belief that she actually loved him and stabs her to death. Renoir treats the murder through an artsy device, keeping his camera focused on street singers outside the building, then raising his camera over the exterior of the building to the third floor to reveal only the aftermath of the murder, with Maurice kissing the hand of his dead lover. Maurice quietly exits the building just before Dédé shows up in a smart new car, planning to take Lulu for a ride. He finds her dead, of course, and slithers off, but not before being seen by a host of witnesses. The police quickly establish Dédé as their chief suspect. He's got a long record of sleazy activities and the mild-mannered and dependable Maurice is an unlikely candidate for commission of such a brutal crime. Dédé is tried, convicted, and executed.

Maurice gets off Scot-free except that he's fired from his job after it is discovered that he was financing a love-nest and an audit of accounts at the firm reveals missing money. Maurice becomes a vagrant, begging for change and currying tips by opening doors for wealthy art buyers. He again encounters Alexis, who has drifted into a similar lot in life, and learns that Adele passed away. In a final irony, a wealthy art buyer delights Maurice by giving him a tip of twenty francs for opening his car door for him as he loads up his expensive new painting – which happens to be a self-portrait that Maurice had done years earlier.

Themes: Renoir takes no prisoners in this excruciating excoriation of humanity, its institutions, and its mercenary and exploitive behavior. A murder occurs, the legal system fails miserably, the wrong man is condemned and executed, but it makes little difference, since he was guilty of other crimes instead, from pimping, to theft, to extortion, to assaulting his girlfriend. Two husbands walk out on the same wife, at different times, yet it makes little difference, since she was such a shrew of a woman that she deserved no better. A woman is murdered, but as a seducer and deceiver, she brought it on herself. The protagonist is brought down from his dull life of decency by a femme fatale and his own repressed hopes for pleasure and love. He pays a fair price for his folly. Nothing about the outcomes of this film is moral, yet it is constructed in such a way, that viewers are invited to be content with the resolutions, and thus complicit in the immorality of humanity. The joke is ultimately on us. This, sadly, is who we are. In our capitalistic and materialistic society, a man's self-portrait sells for 25,000 francs but it's a good day when the man himself is worth 20!

Production Values: The script for La Chienne is radical and was especially radical for 1931. It was based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière. There's not a single character in the story on morally solid footing and the resolution of the story leads to no moral lessons or justice. The film even presages, to an extent, what would become film noir, with its likable but immoral protagonist. Renoir announces up-front, through the hand puppet master of ceremonies, that the story will prove no moral at all. That's a play on words because what the film tends to prove is that there are no morals at all. The story is a searing illumination of the immorality of human society and institutions. Since the film's message is so utterly bleak in representing humanity as essentially amoral, Renoir dressed the story up in a gentle, fresh, and witty style aimed at making the bitter pill palatable.

Renoir uses, for example, a variety of distanciation techniques to keep us focused on the fact that we're watching a story, not reality. The first such technique is the framing of the story in the context of a puppet theater. After the introduction by the master of ceremony, the camera slides in through the backdrop of the theater into the streets of Paris. Then, as the story proceeds, the framing and formal construction of each scene, the frequent use of artsy shots using windows and mirrors, and the touches of surrealism continue to remind us of the constructed nature of the story. Renoir keeps his camera (and thus his viewers) outside of the scenes. Camera movements are slow and fluid, providing a degree of emotional detachment from the story. The murder scene is barely attended to at all, almost as an afterthought. All of these techniques combine to remind us that this is just an amusing story about human foibles, not some profound moral lesson. It is interesting that the same novel that was adapted here by Renoir was later the basis for the Fritz Lang film Scarlet Street (1945), but Lang treats the material in a much darker, ominous, and more violent manner. In Renoir's hands, the story is a black tragicomedy with the emphasis more on comedy than the tragedy. The ending is perversely upbeat. Viewers know that they shouldn't be taking any satisfaction from the outcomes, but we just can't help ourselves.

Michel Simon was a talented actor of the thirties. He starred again for Renoir in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), which picks up, in one sense, where La Chienne leaves off – with Simon playing the part of a bum. Later, he appeared in such films as L’Atalante (1934), Le Quai des Brumes (1938), and The Train (1965). His performance here in La Chienne is flawless. Georges Flament was outstanding as the pimp, Dédé. He later appeared in Truffaut's inaugural film, The 400 Blows (1959).

Bottom-Line: The VHS version of this film from Kino comes with an additional 37-minute short by Renoir entitled A Day in the Country (1936). It's a fine little film in its own right. La Chienne captures the emerging artistry of Jean Renoir that would culminate, before the end of the decade, in two of the great masterpieces of cinema, Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). Although La Chienne is not up to the lofty standards of those films, few films are. The historical importance of La Chienne may be even greater, however, since it was one of the seminal films that launched a golden decade in French cinema.

Recommended:
Yes

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