FROM THE VAULT: 1932

Boudu Saved From Drowning

Starring: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hainia

Director: Jean Renoir

The film: Remade in 1986 and probably better known to English-speaking audiences as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, with Nick Nolte and Richard Dreyfuss, Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning remains one of French cinema's most beloved films. Although Renoir's directorial skills are undeniable, it's Michel Simon in the titular role of the anti-hero who makes it so. Simon was as colourful a character off the screen as he was on, and his experiences mixing with society's outcasts and living in a brothel would have prepared him well for his role as the tramp who finds himself taken in by a well-to-do bookseller (Charles Granval) and his family.

Saved from drowning in the Seine by the head of this straight-laced household, Boudu proceeds to wreak havoc, breaking every code of decency in the book, and reducing the family to a state of near anarchy and total despair. Although this critique of the pre-war French class system may be less relevant today than it was in 1930s France (like several of Renoir's films criticising the French class system, it created uproar in cinemas), it remains a powerful and amusing film.

Mixing traditional filmmaking techniques with a distanced, documentary approach to shots of Simon walking the streets in full character amid an unwitting general public, Renoir (who was the son of impressionist painter Pierre August Renoir) broke new ground here and in this way can be said to have anticipated the New Wave movement that was to follow almost three decades later. But introducing the film for French television in 1967, Renoir admitted, 'I watch Boudu often. Not because I revel in contemplation of my past work, but simply because of Michel Simon. I forget that I made it. All I see is a great actor on the screen.'