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The vivacious joke is on seizing the means of production, Vidor's Our Daily Bread is a fresh memory. The Parisian courtyard doubles as a press shop (and, incidentally, a shoestring studio), the meek clerk (René Lefèvre) comes alive when writing about a Western gunslinger, "Arizona Jim." Capitalism's charming monster, the unctuous publisher (Jules Berry) exploits every employee and seduces every woman, detective stories are more his speed. The laundress (Florelle) prefers romances, her rendition of "À la Belle Étoile" is a Jacques Prévert poem set to music and one of several remarkable long takes. Pulp fiction "like Les Misérables," dreams that come with advertisement, "quelle époque!" Jean Renoir's comedy of working-class solidarity, fast as Hawks and fluid as Ophüls. Marvelous screen spaces, bustling and breathing with the crisscrossing paths of sharpies and busybodies and playboys and old soldiers. Billboards come down so the fellow laid up in his room with a fractured leg can get some sunshine, his girlfriend returns pregnant and he receives her with a shrug. The abandoned secretary allows herself to be picked up at the train station, there's always somebody on the lookout for crying women and departing trains, "sordid but true." The office blooms into a utopian cooperative once the boss is gone, when he returns in his priestly disguise the rêveur must turn man of action, a circular camera movement catches the impromptu execution almost by accident. (The scoundrel expires on the ground while the soused concierge's cries go unheard by a nearby party, "a crime is full of little details like that.") The verdict comes courtesy of the café patrons to whom the tale is told, the crossing of the border promptly reappears in La Grande Illusion. Cinematography by Jean Bachelet. With Marcel Lévesque, Odette Talazac, Henri Guisol, Maurice Baquet, Nadia Sibirskaïa, Sylvia Bataille, and Jean Dasté. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |