Boudu Saved From Drowning

Jean Renoir built this film around the performance of Michel Simon, and therein lies the problem for me. Though much praised, Simon’s performance strikes me less as Chaplinesque and more as sub-Jerry Lewis. Some may see an anarchic proto-hippie to root for in his overthrow of bourgeois values, but I see spastic play-acting. Though reputedly subverted from its stage play antecedent, the film remains stagey despite the depth and fluidity of Renoir’s camerawork. Again the realism of visualization clashes with the artifice of story and performance. There are great street scenes and park settings of Paris in the 30s, and I for one ought to have been engaged with the character of the bookseller who rescues Boudu, but the whole remains inert for me. This is a period curiosity that lets in a lot of ambient reality around and behind the clownish carryings-on -- an interesting specimen but no enduring classic. (1932, dvd, r.) *6-*