L'Atalante 1934 - Widely regarded as one of cinema's finest achievements

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024844/
IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: Jean Vigo
Main Cast: Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Michel Simon

"In his only full-length feature, released shortly before he died at age 29, Jean Vigo led the way for the French poetic realist style, deriving poignant beauty from the drab reality of a couple's marital problems while they live on a river barge. Beginning with their on-shore wedding and near-surreal, low-angle walk to the barge across barren fields, Vigo turns the ups and downs of the couple's mundane existence into rapturously dreamlike visual interludes interspersed with moments of humor and grotesquerie from the barge's other two inhabitants. Expressively shot by Boris Kaufman, the cramped quarters, the river's fog, and the industrial riverfront wastelands complement the struggle between Dita Parlo's bride and Jean Dasté's skipper/husband as they adapt to married life; underwater shots and superimpositions lyrically evoke their anguish after a separation. The catalogue of the cat-loving first mate (Michel Simon)'s eccentric international souvenirs underlines the freedom afforded by barge life.
Unmoved by Vigo's artistic bravery, the producers mutilated L'Atalante in 1934; censors banned it anyway. Finally restored to its original form in 1989, L'Atalante was voted one of the ten best films of the 20th century in a 1999 Village Voice critics' poll." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/latalante-v27800

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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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La chienne (The bitch) 1931 - A bitter and highly controversial psychological drama

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021739/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Jean Renoir
Main Cast: Michel Simon, Janie Marese, Georges Flamant, Magdeleine Berubet

"Jean Renoir's downbeat drama about the dangerous liaisons of a henpecked bank clerk and a hooker is one of his earliest masterpieces. An early example of the poetic realism that would become a dominant strain in the French cinema of the 1930s, it comes from a period in the director's career when he was scouring the margins of French society. Despite the noirish feel of the plot, it has little in common with the romanticism one associates with the genre, its tale of greed and cruelty permeated by a cutting bleakness. Renoir's conclusion, which offers poetic rather than strictly legal justice, was so highly controversial that the film was banned in many locales until the mid-'70s, but seems as entirely fitting now as it did then. Michel Simon, is, as always, inspired as the harried clerk and Sunday painter, his hangdog demeanor and slumping shoulders an eloquent expression of his put-upon character. Renoir's deep focus photography, an advance from that of his earlier work, is sharp and revelatory, conveying a palpable sense of the sordid locations, and the use of natural rather than post-synched sound also adds much to the film's texture." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/la-chienne-v27887/

Download links (French audio with Spanish subtitles - if anyone's interested):