One of Renoir’s earliest masterpieces and perhaps his funniest film, BOUDU is a rowdy social satire built around Michel Simon’s legendary performance as a scruffy tramp who is considerably less lovable than Chaplin’s. Rescued by a do-gooder bourgeois bookseller, Boudu responds with gleefully boorish ingratitude, disrupting his rescuer’s household, grabbing its women, and smashing and/or soiling everything he can get his hands on. Renoir’s invigoratingly slapdash style mixes deep-focus effects, theatrical artifice, and lovely impressionistic glimpses of Paris and its river.
