Saw The Crime of Monsieur Lange, another black-&-white film by Renoir. Again with the nasal-voiced men and the high-toned morality! This time the film is about a publishing company headed by a charming swindler. He gets into one too many schemes and runs off, leaving the young and befuddled writer of a western serial to take over (more or less.) The film is predicated on the writer having committed some kind of terrible crime, but we see his girl-friend is telling the story, so we know that whatever he did, it wasn't too bad.
The film is alright. It has the sweet, genial feel of many old films about little communities (Little shop on the Corner springs to mind.) The film doesn't feel like it's about very much apart from stirring our sentiment. There's a vaguely leftist bent to the film. After the writer takes over, he quickly establishes it as a collective printing workshop and there's much merry chaos brought about by people cooperating. In his stories his hero takes on "the hooded fascist." Apart from this very minor theme I couldn't identify much meat to this story. Renoir I feel is very much a fantasist. His films are very dramatic and operatic, not so much philosophical as much as sophisticated. I'm much more caught up with the characters than with the plot, usually.
Anyway, not a bad film. It's entertaining and slightly maudlin. There are worse films and few that are conspicuously better. Not bad at all just not, I think, for me at this moment.
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