BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING

(1932, Jean Renoir) Épater le bourgeois with a vengeance, as an easy-going bookseller Charles Granval saves aromatic bum Michel Simon from watery immolation, then finds him taking over house, mistress, and wife. The original playwright was enraged when Renoir changed his ending and wasn’t mollified until a 50s revival. Approx. 87 min. DCP.

REVIEWS

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"As played by the sly, exuberant Simon, Boudu is a shambling, willful, concupiscent child, a walking id—and, with his Harpo-like mop of curly blond hair and repertoire of chaotic pratfalls, he rattles through the household like a Marx Brother, but one whose breakage costs money, whose insults register and sting, and whose priapic antics prove truly destructive."
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Click here to listen to Richard Brody discuss Boudu Saved From Drowing

“Makes one nostalgic for the period when it was made.”
– Pauline Kael

“Feels as ripe now as it did the year it was made… So poignantly human and so terrifyingly relevant.”
– David Jenkins, Time Out (London)

“Jean Renoir's effortless 1932 masterpiece is as informal, beguiling, and subversive as its eponymous hero...Michel Simon's Boudu is one of the great creations of the cinema...the film features several early experiments with deep focus and nonnaturalistic sound, though its chief stylistic feature is Renoir's incomparable way of gently shifting moods, from the farcical to the lyrical to the tragic and back again."
– David Kehr, Chicago Reader