La regle du jeu (The rules of the game) 1939 - A tragi-comic indictment on Europe on the verge of war

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031885/
IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Jean Renoir
Main Cast: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Gaston Modot, Jean Renoir, Pierre Magnier

"Now often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu/The rules of the game was not warmly received on its original release in 1939: audiences at its opening engagements in Paris were openly hostile, responding to the film with shouts of derision, and distributors cut the movie from 113 minutes to a mere 80. It was banned as morally perilous during the German occupation and the original negative was destroyed during WWII. It wasn't until 1956 that Renoir was able to restore the film to its original length. In retrospect, this reaction seems both puzzling and understandable; at its heart, Rules of the game is a very moral film about frequently amoral people. A comedy of manners whose wit only occasionally betrays its more serious intentions, it contrasts the romantic entanglements of rich and poor during a weekend at a country estate.
Renoir's witty, acidic screenplay makes none of the characters heroes or villains, and his graceful handling of his cast is well served by his visual style. He tells his story with long, uninterrupted takes using deep focus (cinematographer Jean Bachelet proves a worthy collaborator here), following the action with a subtle rhythm that never calls attention to itself. The sharply-cut hunting sequence makes clear that Renoir avoided more complex editing schemes by choice, believing that long takes created a more lifelike rhythm and reduced the manipulations of over-editing. Rules of the game uses WWI as an allegory for WWII, and its representation of a vanishing way of life soon became all too true for Renoir himself, who, within a year of the film's release, was forced to leave Europe for the United States." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-rules-of-the-game-v42292

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La bete humaine (The human beast) 1938 - An excellent, moody adaptation of Zola's novel

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029957/
IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Jean Renoir
Main Cast: Jean Gabin, Fernand Ledoux, Simone Simon, Blanchette Brunoy

"Jean Renoir's masterful adaptation of the Emile Zola novel of heredity and fate has been cited as both a reflection of the fatalistic mood in France in the face of Nazi Germany's aggression and as a blueprint for many postwar film noirs. It's also part of a magnificent mini-run in Renoir's career, preceded by Grand illusion and followed, two films later, by Rules of the game. The film begins and ends with a train hurtling noisily down a track, the camera shooting from either the engineer's point of view or from the very front of the locomotive, and the sensation is one of imminent danger. Jean Gabin's Jacques Lantier is a man haunted by his family's history of alcoholism; although he is able to stay away from booze, he is still prone to seizures and blackouts. He accepts his fate as a damaged man, even rejecting love from a young woman who promises to be patient with him. Instead, his involvement with the self-absorbed Séverine (Simone Simon) and her jealous husband, the stationmaster Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), accelerates his sense of doom. The Roubauds are concealing a crime, and Jacques becomes their accomplice, falling in love with Séverine, whom he rightly senses is a damaged soul like himself. 'I always got what I wanted', Séverine says in reference to her godfather, but we soon learn that the old man extracted something in return. Renoir sets much of the action on the train or in the railroad yards, an all-male preserve that becomes a trysting spot for Jacques and Séverine's first sexual encounter. Almost every scene is perfectly orchestrated, none better than a later post-coital conversation in which Jacques shows an unhealthy interest in how the Roubauds committed their crime and then Séverine sighs, 'If my husband were out of the way...'
Fans of Double indemnity, The postman always rings twice, Human desire (Fritz Lang's take on Zola's story), and Body heat will recognize that line, as well as Séverine's desperate attempt at a dance hall to brush off the persistent Jacques, 'We have no future'." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/la-b%C3%AAte-humaine-v27862

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La grande illusion (Grand illusion) 1937 - One of the greatest films ever made

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028950/
IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: Jean Renoir
Main Cast: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim

"A 'poetic realist' masterpiece, Jean Renoir's Grand illusion eloquently revealed the absurdity of war in a story about escape from a World War I German prison camp. One of the first sound film masters of the mobile camera, Renoir structured his film through a series of long takes in deep focus, moving gracefully yet subtly among the characters to embed them in rather than isolate them from their environments. With this observational style, Renoir examined the 'grand illusions' threatening Europe in the 1930s and humankind in general: war and the artificial distinctions of class and nation that drive it. Each of the four main characters stands for a particular social stratum, with their metaphorical places revealed through realistic details of conversation and quotidian behavior. This emphasis on the reality of daily life in prison camps, complete with dialogue in several languages and easygoing camaraderie between prisoners and guards, suggests the core of humanity shared by all, regardless of class, language, and cultural divisions. The poetic final image of an invisible border hidden beneath an expanse of white snow punctuates Renoir's benevolently humanist stance. Grand illusion was a hit in the U.S. as well as in France, even receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Picture; it also received a special prize at the 1937 Venice Film Festival despite being banned in Italy and Germany. Regularly listed as one of the best films ever made, Grand illusion's power remains undiminished, while the impact of Renoir's audacious style can be seen from the work of Orson Welles to the French New Wave." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/grand-illusion-v20464/

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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):