The Lower Depths

Renoir's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's play. Gorky himself approved the transfer to film. The setting is a doss house: a place where people who cannot find work, who are in debt, ill or drinking, live together and cannot even pay the rent. A thief arrives, and then a baron who has just gambled away everything he owned. An odd friendship forms between them: one has never had anything, the other has just lost all of it. Renoir does not keep all of Gorky's pessimism. In place of the Russian text's hopelessness the French version has a lighter, warmer register, and the ending departs from the source. Jean Gabin plays the thief and Louis Jouvet the baron. Gabin's image as a working-class hero in this period was largely built on films like this one. It won the first Louis Delluc Prize. An important work for anyone who likes 1930s French cinema and ensemble stories. For a viewer who knows Gorky's play, the film is far more conciliatory than expected.