The Bitch (1931)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The bitch |
| Original title | La Chienne |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1931 |
| length | 91 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jean Renoir |
| script |
André Girard , Jean Renoir |
| production |
Pierre Braunberger , Roger Richebé |
| music |
Eugénie Buffet , Enrico Toselli , Fernando Sor |
| camera | Théodore Sparkuhl |
| cut |
Denise Tual , Paul Fejos , Marguerite Renoir |
| occupation | |
| |
The bitch (original title: La Chienne) is the second sound film by the French film director Jean Renoir from 1931. Michel Simon is cast in the leading role. The film is based on the novel La Chienne by Georges de La Fouchardière from 1929 and the theater play by André Mouëzy-Éon from 1930 based on this novel.
action
Maurice Legrand is 42 years old, unhappily married and has a passion for painting. One night when he wants to go back to his bossy wife after a party among colleagues, he meets the prostitute Lucienne and her pimp Dédé, who beats her up. Maurice intervenes and falls in love with the young woman on this occasion. He gives her presents and tries to seduce her, but she refuses him because she finds him too old and is in love with her pimp Dédé, despite the fact that he beats her and ignores her feelings.
One day the heavily indebted Dédé has the idea to resell Maurice's pictures under a false name and pass off Lucienne as the artist. Meanwhile, Maurice meets his wife's first husband, ex-Sergeant Godard, who was believed to have been lost during the war. He manages to outsmart him, brings him together with his wife and now believes he is free. When he then rushes to Lucienne, he discovers her with Dédé, who promptly flees. When his beloved rejects and humiliates him, Maurice becomes enraged and stabs the prostitute. Later, Dédé returns and flees in horror when he discovers Lucienne's body. Because the house concierge observed and recognized him, he was later caught by the police and sentenced to death as a murderer.
Maurice, plagued by a guilty conscience and now completely alone, is fired by his boss for stealing money from the cash register to finance his expenses for Lucienne. The epilogue shows an old and neglected Maurice who meets another Clochard, in whom he recognizes Godard, who is now just as old. While they are both chatting, the self-portrait of the former amateur painter is being carried from a gallery into a classy car next door. Maurice rushes to the car to open the car door. Godard chases the tip from him. Both laugh, and Maurice and his old friend say yes to how beautiful life is.
Reviews
On the occasion of the DVD release of the restored version of the film as part of the Criterion Collection in 2016, Richard Brody called The Bitch in his review in the New Yorker “a grim, bitter-ironic drama, a diabolical satire on bourgeois hypocrisy”. It goes on to say: “Although he began in the silent film era, Renoir only achieved his calling as a filmmaker with the advent of talkies; [...] 'The Bitch' is both his first big film and the beginning of a career of increasingly daring connections between documentarism and theater, of increasingly defiant moral and amoral provocations that [...] hurl their own depravity and falsehood at the viewer. "
“A satirical examination of the conventions, traditions and morals of their time of origin, sometimes cynical and crossing the line to caricature. Excellent in terms of milieu drawing and representation. "
literature
- Jean Renoir: My life and my films. Autobiography . Translated by Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas . Diogenes, Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-257-22452-4 . (on The Bitch : pp. 92-102)
- André Bazin : Jean Renoir . Translated by Udo Feldbusch. Hanser, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-446-12430-6 . (on The Bitch : pp. 16-20)
- Alexander Sesonske: Jean Renoir - The French Films 1924–1939 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. & London 1980, ISBN 0-674-47360-4 . (on The Bitch : pp. 77-101)
- Ronald Bergan: Jean Renoir - Projections of Paradise . Overlook Press, Woodstock & New York 1994, ISBN 0-87951-537-6 . (Chapter 15)
- Martin O'Shaughnessy: Jean Renoir . Manchester University Press, Manchester & New York 2000, ISBN 0-7190-5063-4 . (on The Bitch : pp. 75–79)
- Institut Français de Munich / CICIM (Ed.): Jean Renoir and the 1930s. Social utopia and aesthetic revolution . Institut Français de Munich, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-920727-11-8 . (on The Bitch : pp. 21–26)
Web links
- The dog in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- La Chienne , essay by Darragh O'Donoghue, in: Senses of Cinema, Issue 69 (December 2013).
Individual evidence
- ^ Programm.ARD.de - ARD Play-Out-Center Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany: The bitch. Retrieved May 12, 2017 .
- ^ Institut Français de Munich / CICIM (Ed.): Jean Renoir and the Thirties , p. 97.
- ↑ For a very detailed description of the action see André Bazin: Jean Renoir , pp. 16–19.
- ↑ La Chienne - Jean Renoir in criterion.com, accessed on May 16, 2017th
- ↑ Richard Brody: Jean Renoir's Ferocious “La Chienne” , In: The New Yorker, June 8, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017.
- ↑ The bitch. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed May 13, 2017 .