Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu saved from drowning) 1932 - A classic black comedy from Jean Renoir

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022718/
IMDB rating: 7,6

Director: Jean Renoir
Main Cast: Michel Simon, Marcelle Hainia, Severine Lerczinska

"In 1932 director Jean Renoir and French star Michel Simon, fresh from their early-sound triumph La Chienne, decided to re-team in adapting a stage farce (by René Fauchois) about a derelict rescued from the river by a bookseller and groomed for bourgeois society. Boudo Saved From Drowning is notable for its innovative film techniques, its bizarre characterizations, and its 'modern' style of acting. It's the thin tale of a scruffy hobo (played by the film's producer, Michel Simon) whom a well-to-do French family saves from drowning. Instead of being grateful, he plagues the family, carrying on an affair with the lady of the household. Boudu soon became a minor classic of French cinema. Arguably the first French New Wave film, nearly 30 years before there was a New Wave - is one of those cardinal works in which we can see, and experience anew, a great filmmaker inventing the cinema. Without jettisoning the formal qualities of the theatrical farce, Renoir opens his film to light, fresh air, and the teeming multifariousness of Parisian street life; the denizens of the city become unwitting extras in the movie as Boudu first shambles, then prances, among them. The deep-focus camerawork is exhilarating, but even the gregarious roughness of the production feels right, indeed essential.
It was not released in the United States until 1967, when it became an art-house hit.
Years later, it inspired a remake set in the Los Angeles area, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, starred Nick Nolte, Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler."

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