The son of the great French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir is recognized as one of the first auteurs in the history of cinema. As a film director, he made multiple masterpieces of both the silent and sound eras from the early 1920s to the late 1960s. Best known for La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir paved the way for the French New Wave and influenced New Hollywood auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Peter Bogdanovich.
In 1975, Renoir received an Honorary Academy Award as “a genius who, with grace, responsibility and enviable devotion through silent film, sound film, feature, documentary and television, has won the world’s admiration.” Let’s look at the best movies from Renoir, ranked.
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7 A Day in the Country
Joseph Burstyn Inc.
Based on a short story written by Guy de Maupassant, the 1936 bittersweet featurette A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) follows the Parisian family on a summer trip to the French countryside. The grown daughter, Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) falls in love with a country boy and her life changes forever in this dreamy coming-of-age story. A Day in the Country is a visual poem and one of the filmmaker’s most lyrical works.
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In 1936, Renoir left the production process of A Day in the Country incomplete due to bad weather. Thankfully, this 40 minute classic was released in its current form in 1946 and A Day in the Country is now enjoyed by movie lovers, serving as an influence for many great independent movies.
6 The Southerner
United Artists
After Germany invaded France during World War II, Renoir moved to the United States and made there his “American” films. The 1945 drama The Southerner is regarded as the filmmaker’s Hollywood masterpiece. The Oscar-nominated film portrays the hardships of a Texas cotton picker, Sam Tucker (Zachary Scott), who wants to create a better life for his poor family. In 1945, The New York Times wrote, “The Southerner may not be an ’entertainment’ in the rigid Hollywood sense and it may have some flaws, but it is, nevertheless, a rich, unusual and sensitive delineation of a segment of the American scene well worth filming and seeing.”
5 French Cancan
Gaumont Film Company
In the 1950s, Renoir returned to work in Europe and made a trilogy of brightly colored spectacles, The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men. The 1955 musical comedy French Cancan is arguably the best among these films. French Cancan is a dazzling tale of the opening of the world-renowned Parisian cabaret Moulin Rouge. The film is Renoir’s happiest work and his visual homage to the paintings of Edgar Degas and other Impressionists, including his father.
4 The River
Set in India and filmed there as well, Jean Renoir’s first movie in color, The River, or Le Fleuve, tells the story of the growing pains of three young girls along the banks of the Ganges River. Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray got a job as Renoir’s assistant and helped the French director make “a film about India without elephants and tiger hunts.” Renoir’s 1951 movie is a meditative, beautiful, and thoughtful coming-of-age story – but the real love of The River is India itself. This film inspired Wes Anderson to make his own comedy-drama about India, The Darjeeling Limited.
3 La Bête Humaine
Cinématographique de France
Based on the celebrated Émile Zola novel of the same name, the 1938 film La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) tells the grimly fatalistic story of a workingman’s inbred compulsion to murder. Things become complicated when a train engineer Jacques Lantier (an iconic Jean Gabin performance) begins a passionate affair with a troubled married woman. Part poetic realism, part film noir, La Bête Humaine is Renoir’s darkest work and his first major commercial success. The movie influenced the golden era of American film noir.
2 The Rules of the Game
Renoir’s 1939 satirical masterpiece The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) tells the story of a lavish hunting weekend at the marquis’ country château at the onset of World War II. The director held a mirror up to corrupt French upper-class society. As The New York Times wrote, “etiquette and pageantry excuse the characters from dealing honestly with matters of the heart, and perhaps even blind them to the encroaching darkness of World War II.”
A box-office failure in 1939 that was subjected to cuts after the criticism of French audiences, now Renoir’s satirical comedy-drama is often cited as one of the greatest films of all time. The Rules of the Game influenced Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, Ingmar Bergman’s great movieSmiles of a Summer Night, Theo Angelopoulos’ The Hunters, and many other films.
1 La Grande Illusion
World Pictures
The 1937 anti-war film La Grande Illusion (also known as The Grand Illusion) is hailed as the masterpiece of French cinema and one of the greatest films ever made. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, labeled La Grande Illusion as “the Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1” because this story of war prisoners finding brotherhood and hope in a World War I German POW camp voiced the mounting pacifist sentiment. When the Germans occupied France during World War II, the Nazis seized the prints and negative of La Grande Illusion. But Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece survived, and hopefully always will. The film was adored by Orson Welles, who proclaimed, “If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be Grand Illusion,” this film should be seen by all.
