Nana is a Naturalist work, Petite Marchande Expressionist; Boudu has gained a reputation for being realistic. One of the first sound films shot on location, it is built entirely on its observation of bourgeois and hobo behavior.

In fact, Boudu is nothing but a series of episodes premised on one conflict: between the free spirit of a tramp, Boudu, and the constriction of the bourgeois home of the Lestingois. A set of skillfully linked skits (The Lestingois Eat Dinner, Boudu Seduces Mme. Lestingois), it depends for its interest on acting which establishes its characters strongly as individuals. "Strongly" means "broadly:" Michel Simon plays Boudu for slapstick, and Mme. Lestingois' character is established just as quickly through her gestures and her place in the frame. Renoir again uses lighting and placement in the frame to exploit his actors' personal appearances and establish their personalities. The maid, for example, comes in with the groceries; going to a window, she leans out and hangs them on a hook, looking up into the camera. The camera angle (high, down on her), the framing of her head and shoulders in the window, her expression and glance show that she is pretty, idealistic, sentimental, and sprightly--an impression unchanged by later events.

Renoir gives entire scenes to one character, often connecting scenes by following a character from one room to the next. This gives us a sense, otherwise absent, of the plan of the Lestingois' home. Renoir frames his shots too closely for us to see the logic of the house's plan, how it fits together. His shots instead give a strong sense of its character. The cramped shots, which often cut off actors' heads and feet, express the constriction of this home. They bring objects, usually a gauzy white, to the surface of the frame to create a china-shop atmosphere. Boudu is the bull. The spacious shots at the film's beginning and end show him in his natural milieu--they are deep and spacious. His body and movements are much too large for the Lestingois' home; he constantly bumps into things, destroys them. An outsider, he escapes unchanged into his natural place at the end.

The thematic material that crops up through the film reinforces its basic circularity, lack of progress. At the beginning a satyr pursues a nymph in a Neo-Classical setting. When Boudu and Mme. Lestingois tumble to the floor, the camera holds on a picture of a trumpeter of sexual nature. The marriage of Boudu to the maid near the end again has classical overtones (Lestingois names him "Priapus Boudu"). Each classifies the action of the characters as one pattern of the Eternal Human. These elements, inexplicable in a work regarded as realistic, becomes clear when one recognizes Renoir's indulgent attitude to people's behavior. This behavior is the sole substance of Boudu; Renoir does not move beyond its surface-patterns to an overview of its place in the world and its moral implications, but instead molds it so that it fits into his closed work. Each character has a chance to play out his part in this circular drama.

Toni is Neo-Realist in its location shooting and close observation of daily behavior. Beginning with a group of immigrants entering a southern French village, it follows them through a few years of marriage, estrangement, friendship, death--all the processes of their lives. The setting, strongly established in the first shots (of the landscape from a moving train), remains prominent throughout. The characters have a definite place in the setting, one of isolation, inability of penetrate its surface. Elements of a geometrical pattern (the two-dimensional pattern of each shot), the figures of the characters are barred from real unity, warmth, or security in the land.

Actually there are two basic kinds of shots in Toni. The first, described above, shows the land unpeopled or with figures clearly placed on its surface. The second is a close shot of one or more people which shows little more than their faces. The dramatic function of the close shots is to show the characters very strong, in themselves--or rather, in the grip of those immovable passions which express their selves. Their strength of character is a strength that comes from fixity. The long shots are used to show characters carrying out these passions. Their actions have a fatality and clarity which echoes the characters' alienation from the land.

One character, more passionate than the others, fights the land harder and is killed. More desperate for love, Toni is also more conscious of his isolation: he repeatedly does not know what to do (depends on Fernand's advice) or where to stand (his position in the frame is often awkward). His restlessness and wish for something more (note his dissatisfaction with Marie), and ultimately set him against the other characters, who have a stable if alienated relation to the land. One of them finally shoots him. It is the Hunter, a mysterious figure who keeps appearing at odd moments in awkward positions. He has no more stable place than Toni, but because Renoir has not established his character (in the sense of spirit: we certainly know Toni's spirit), he seems to act automatically, as part of the land. His shooting of Toni is in human terms a stupid mistake, against the gendarme's orders; but his inexplicable action is a fated act, one which the land and the plot dictate. The character most like Toni kills him.

The world of Crime is a dreamworld. The film begins with a twilight car-journey whose origins and end are uncertain. The dialogue when the car stops at a hotel tells us we have arrived at the border--from what land to what, we don't know. The couple from the car enters the hotel and goes to a room; the camera cuts to a conversation in the bar about their identity. In the middle of the men's conversation a woman, Valentine, appears. Highlighted and surrounded closely by them, she tells her story--a love-tale, the degree of whose truth we can't determine. By its end the moral urgings of the men who wanted to turn the couple over to the police have been lost. The couple departs, the men waving to them, in a dream-image of sand-flats and mist.

As the flashback device establishes, this dream is a woman's. A woman's point of view is maintained throughout. We are introduced to Lange by a pan around the objects in his room. His childish fantasies are treated more sympathetically than others' hard situations. The film accords entirely with his idealism; this world is governed not by social structure, rules, or decisions, but by people's illusions. It's a sort of Utopian socialism with Lange, the man Valentine (narrator) loves, at its center. His woman-chasing, though absurdly inept, is treated indulgently. The predominance of white surfaces and bright light (Valentine, a laundress, loves clean white surfaces) excludes a view which, including black and white, would give us a moral scheme for this world by recognizing contrary pulls, polarities of good and evil in each person and object. Instead every thing is idealized; all the women, for example, are so lighted as to tend to Valentine's type of beauty.

That the film is from Valentine's point of view explains the place of Batala, its real protagonist. Batala is a big man because he's Valentine's former lover. Every shot treats him as a sexual threat. The film's greatest artist, he is a master of connivance, of disguise, of business, and of sexual persuasion. Full of spirit, he returns from the dead to take over his business once again. Usually photographed in black clothes and dark settings, his personal power is greater than any other's.

But Valentine has taken to Lange, whose artistry--dreaming, doing good--is of a completely different nature. Therefore Batala has to go. Even in the early part of the film he is kept in his office, behind doors, within bounds. He does not fit into Valentine's plan of the world is a place friendly to Lange's fantasies. Valentine pushes her creature, a pampered artist, into the murder of a far greater artist, a capitalist who depends on nobody but himself.

"Films that take place in a prison are very convenient because the characters are automatically cut off, which is a great help in telling a story. With "La Grande Illusion," for instance, the fact that it's all enclosed within four walls is marvelous; it's a foolproof situation." --JEAN RENOIR

In Grande Illusion Renoir elevates his characters' behavior to the status themes hold in his earlier works. Every personal characteristic is made significant; each idiosyncrasy is important in the social structure that links the prisoners. A very tightly built work in which every gesture is necessary, its characters' behavior seems thin because it is so exploited. Renoir says he made the film to show "how men meet each other;" men's mannerisms create social bonds as the film progresses. By the end we see how it is possible for society to work.

It works through individual illusions which, sending characters on divergent courses of action, ultimately knit them together. Consider Boildieu and Marechal; from the beginning their actions (in the German squadron's mess-hall, for example) show that their tastes lie in entirely different directions. But their social situations eventually unite them. Rauffenstein's affectionate treatment of Boildieu shows the latter the fragility and absurdity of the aristocratic way of life in the present; he abandons this illusion for another, that of escape (but at second hand, for he ties himself to the aristocratic mode even when it assures his death). Escape the illusion which has held the French together; their tunnel-digging and concealment of their work with songs and acts have a theatrical air which completely engrosses them (they forget the man in the tunnel, who is nearly asphyxiated). Each character, in fact, plays a part more or less consciously; all are aware of their personal oddities, and maintain them because of the artificial closed situation to which they are subjected. Each is allowed to play out his part to some sort of resolution before the film leaves him.

The scenes are very stylized so that this can happen. Several begin with a shot of an object, the center of the scene (a gramophone in the messhall, a crate of food in prison) which follows. With the scene so clearly organized, characters' places also become clear. This is especially true of the scene in which Marechal and Rosenthal walk along a German road far from the last prison camp. The background is almost completely bare, expressing their freedom but also their loneliness and lack of social surroundings and definition as they quarrel over a relatively minor irritation (Rosenthal's wounded foot), almost separating for lack of society, which would push them together.