In Renoir's view the social relations he describes unite all men. The private province of the aristocrats is thus doomed, and Rauffenstein and Boildieu become the outsiders of the film. The nearest Boildieu comes to Democratic integration with the rest is by participating in the common illusion, that of escape, although his interests lie in staying where aristocratic privilege is still maintained. At the same time Boildieu recognizes that his personal style cannot be reconciled with the others. He therefore sentences himself to death. Marechal is his opposite number; less conscious of himself, he is impulsively romantic--his wish for love is a theme running through the film. He is the most devoted to the illusion of escape--an illusion which, turning out to be a reality (against Rauffenstein's statements), vindicates his democratic milieu and dooms Boildieu's. Marechal's escape depends on the democratic brotherhood of man--not only in the end, when the German border guards do not fire on him and Rosenthal but wish them well, but at the moment that they go over the wall. Boildieu is shot by Rauffenstein--the nobles as a class commit suicide--but he dies for Marechal.

The large cast of Regle means that the film establishes each character only to cut immediately to another. There is some ensemble playing, but Renoir more often cuts together scenes of different pairs or triplets of characters to parallel their behavior. As in Boudu, Renoir's superior attitude toward people's behavior as a recurrent human pattern becomes evident here. In Regle he creates types rather than characters--immediately recognizable, quickly established types who are never given the time to themselves to become characters.

Regle is Grande Illusion with twice the characters and three times the events. Where the characters of the earlier film unite in common activities (the tunnel, the vaudeville show), the common functions of Regle's characters quickly split into private affairs in different rooms. The action is so fragmented that Renoir's crosscutting creates a world of clutter and trivial detail. Though Renoir may disapprove of some actions (the rabbit-hunt sequence implies that he condemns at least the final shooting), his interest overwhelmingly lies in creating an entire society from patterns of human behavior. The achievement of a complete work of art takes precedence over moral judgments.

A man of great spirit is, as usual, opposed to this game-ruled world to explore it and create dramatic tension. His character and desires are rather adolescent--but, placed in such a decadent world, who can blame him? He is as usual killed by the society which he would rend apart if he survived--killed, interestingly enough, by the gamekeeper, whose situation (an unfaithful love) and reaction (that of the serious, morally involved) parallels his. The society envelops his death in one more of its rituals, but in so doing strains perhaps to the breaking point.

THE AMERICAN FILMS: open works shaped around the hero's development.

Renoir's American movies are certainly not so complex and tightly constructed as the last of his French films. Nevertheless, their different plot construction and intention introduces new concerns into Renoir's work which immediately changes the style and structure of his film-making. In the long run it completes the development of his films as closed works of art by making him aware of the dramatic and visual implications of his idealism.

Previously that idealism had been realized mainly in the characters of his heroes, men of more spirit than their friends. Character development in these films, frequently multiple, sometimes multi-directional (Les Bas-Fonds), was made orderly only by its integration into the whole work. From the behavior of characters the world was constructed--a world based on recurrent processes rather than mental development.

American screenplays, however, are generally written around the development of one character, designed to illustrate that development. Entirely concerned with matters of the soul, they doubly nullify Renoir's dramatic construction. (1) A closed social world which kills the hero becomes rare, since the film takes the side of his development, and other characters are used to define (by comparison and contrast, also by struggle) his development more often than to defeat it completely. (2) the American mental drama tends continually to transcendence; it ends up far from where it began. Personal development is one way. A circular dramatic plan, which emphasizes recurrent behavior instead of the progress from one sort of behavior to a better one, is hardly well adapted to American purposes.

Renoir's American films thus use fewer characters and a well-defined background to illustrate by comparison and contrast the progress of the hero. Somewhat thin and didactic, they are nevertheless interesting in showing Renoir's ability to treat the background as an entity of psychological and moral import. His use of long shot and camera motion also changes; getting away from the quick cutting and short motions that reached a peak in Regle, his style does not return to Toni's surface-creating pans, but creates a more three-dimensional space in the composition of shots and use of tracks.

The most striking single aspect of Southerner is Renoir's visual treatment of the land. An early tracking shot toward a run-down homestead with an old woman's voice complaining is strangely interesting, especially when Renoir cuts to shots of the dilapidated house, the voice continuing. Later shots, often low-angle, of Sam (the hero, an aspiring farmer) working his land set up an intimate relation between them which remains two-term, his figure vertical and the land horizontal. Sam is neither alienated from nor assimilated into the land; he can leave it, go into the city; but when he is on his farm there is always a relation between them.

The nature of this relationship becomes clear near the end of the film. Over narration (Sam: "and I hear the land calling to me, like Nora [his wife] does sometimes") a shot of him lying in bed with his wife dissolves to a shot of the land, then back, and forth in a dissolve montage. The land is a sexual entity for Sam. His attempts to farm it at once have to conquer and to love it. The setbacks and triumphs of his relation with it develop his character, even as the visual aspect of the relation at any one point tells us the stage this development has reached.

Woman on the Beach (1947) similarly treats the land as a psychological-sexual entity. Its misty and stormy exteriors reveal as little as the principal woman of the film to the hero, in terms of whose point of view the whole movie is shot. Some wonderful bits of drama result; the hero's God-like power relation to a blind man is realized in high-angle shots down from the hero (astride a horse) onto the man and down over a sheer cliff beside which the blind man is walking. The blind man (the woman's husband) at the end burns his paintings, and his house, on which he has depended, to free himself from them and begin living again. The hero approaches their house over dune-grass, flames in the distance--expressing the new self-realization of the hero and the blind painter. But on the whole the plot's thinness and the small number of characters does not support Renoir's stylization of background and other components of the frame.

THE LATER FILMS: assimilation into a closed ideal world and work.

Renoir's later works, Cordelier at least excepted, become once more closed works in which the end affirms the same world as the beginning. But Renoir now depends less on paralleled behavior to build his works, and the identity of the world is based less on behavior than on ideals. These works' worlds are ideal worlds, distant from the present--a girl's imagination (The River), the New World in the Seventeenth Century (La Carrosse d'Or), fin-de-siecle Paris (French Can-Can). Personal change is a growth of awareness with moral consequences.

The heroes of these works, the most idealistic ones, are now assimilated into the world and the work because these have become ideal. The consequent loss of their identity is if anything more frightening than the death of his earlier heroes suffered.