Boudou Saved From Drowning

Jean Renoir's critique of middle-class values Boudou Saved From Drowning (Boudu Sauve des Eaux) made a star of Swiss actor Michel Simon (La Chienne, L'Atalante). Simon's performance as a Parisian tramp named Boudou, who is "rescued" from a suicide attempt by bourgeois bookseller Edouard Lestingois, caused riots in theaters when it was released in 1932. When his dog runs off from the shade of a tree where they had been lounging together in the Bois de Boulogne, Boudou searches desperately before jumping into the Seine, in a remarkably-filmed scene featuring a long take on a Paris street with hidden camera. Lestingois, who has been spying on girls walking on the sidewalk through a telescope, spots Boudou prior to his dive into the water and comments that he is a perfect specimen of vagrant. Lestingois rushes to Boudou's rescue from the river, diving in and carrying him to safety to the bemused amazement of the Depression-era public, who have been watching the scene unfold from bridges over the Seine. All hell breaks loose when Lestingois completes his rescue of Boudou by dressing him up and tutoring him in middle-class manners and values. Boudou disrupts the entire household, cuckolding Lestingois of both wife and mistress (his maid Anne Marie) who, in dispassionate bourgeois custom, live under the same roof. Boudou, the pure id that Lestingois has repressed, revels in the anarchy he creates but finds he must, once again, plunge himself into water to escape the constrictive conventions of modern society--though this time to much different ends. Renoir, who had paired with Simon the year before with La Chienne, went on in 1937-1939 to make three of the greatest movies of the decade: La Grand Illusion, La Bete Humaine, La Regle de Jeu (Rules of the Game). Seemingly never far from water, Simon later starred as the tattooed barge sailor Jules (and his many mechanical objects, kittens, and accordian) in Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante (1934). Boudou Saved From Drowning was needlessly remade as the horrible Down and Out in Beverly Hills in 1986.