The Crime of Monsieur Lange

The film Renoir made during the Popular Front years, and the one that carries that spirit most openly. Batala owns a small publishing house: a swindler, in debt, exploiting his employees and preying on the women who work there. One day, running from creditors, he disappears and is presumed dead. The employees turn the firm into a cooperative, and the cowboy stories Lange writes in his spare time, Arizona Jim, suddenly sell. Then Batala comes back. Jacques Prévert wrote the script from a story by Renoir and Jean Castanier. The film was made under the influence of Prévert's socialist theatre collective, Le Groupe Octobre, and part of the cast came from it. Renoir's long camera movement circling the courtyard is its most cited passage, building the whole of the neighbourhood in one shot. André Bazin considered it one of Renoir's most beautiful and most representative works. Important for anyone interested in 1930s French cinema and the idea of collective production. Short but loose for a viewer used to today's pacing.