Cashier Maurice Legrand is married to Adele, a terror. By chance, he meets Lucienne, "Lulu", and make her his mistress. He thinks he finally met love, but Lulu is nothing but a streetwalker, in love with Dede, her pimp. She only accepts Legrand to satisfy Dede's needs of money.
Michel Simon Janie Marèse Georges Flamant Magdeleine Bérubet Roger Gaillard Jean Gehret Alexandre Rignault Lucien Mancini Marcel Courmes Max Dalban Henri Guisol Romain Bouquet Pierre Desty Jane Pierson Christian Argentin Sylvain Itkine Colette Borelli Mlle Doryans Agnès Capri Adèle Legrand Olga Nilza Viviane Romance
The Bitch, Isn't Life a Bitch?, La golfa, 암캐, La cagna, Die Hündin, Yöperhonen, A Cadela, Dişi Köpek, 母狗, Сука, Fena
France12
France
Somehow, in reading about La Chienne before watching it, I managed not to discover that it comes from the same source material as Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, and that the two film often hew very close to one another in terms of narrative. Jean Renoir's film, however (just his second with sound), is even darker than Lang's grim tale, crammed with profoundly hopeless, charmless characters who either pretend at control, or admit they don't have it and simply wait to die. Though the figures in the two films are essentially the same — a hen-pecked, unhappy cashier who wants to be a painter and his shrew of a wife; a sex worker so in love with her brutal pimp she'll…
I’d seen the Fritz Lang version of this same story, under the title Scarlet Street, but Renoir’s earlier adaptation (“The Bitch” in English) is so much nastier. Michel Simon is perfect as the sad cashier and frustrated artist who takes up with a prostitute, his hangdog jowls and pathetic horniness and attempts at good cheer make him a more loathsome and intriguing figure than the tragic Edward G. Robinson.
Mind you, every single person in the movie is pretty horrible, the women are shrews and chiselers, the men are dirtbags and abusers and fools. Janie Marese doesn’t make a strong impression as the languid Lulu, but George Flamant makes a meal of her casually cruel, tragically un-self-aware pimp boyfriend…
8th Jean Renoir (after Partie De Campagne, Rules of the Game, La Grande Illusion, French Cancan, The Golden Coach, Night at the Crossroads and Elena and Her Men)
Broke: La Chienne is an early noir
Woke: La Chienne shows the influence of the naturalist school of writers, who Renoir would later adapt with La Bête Humaine.
Bespoke: Michel Simon is the original Simp.
Renoir's first sound film is a real masterstroke, proving his natural ability with sound cinema. His camera technique is smooth and unflustered, with a number of graceful tracking shots inside the protagonist's apartment. The use of fade-outs and title cards, too, give the whole film something of a relaxed atmosphere, seemingly at odds with the sordid nature…
Less dangerous, less destructive than the Blue Angel or Scarlet Street, but Renoir's world is more real, as expressive in its details as its shadows and the odd attention-seeking camera deployments. The puppet show opening is one of the great statements of artistic mission from a director who was weirdly prone to such pronouncements.
Commencing with a quick prologue in which three puppets discuss the tale about to unfold, La Chienne illustrates a world that's grounded in reality yet presented poetically and strengthened by an intricate use of sound.
Adapted and directed by Jean Renoir from a book by Georges de la Fouchardiere and starring Michel Simon, who provides an extraordinary physicality to the oppressed central character Maurice Legrand. Legrand embodies a tragic figure. An unhappily married cashier and novice painter who comes to be so smitten with prostitute Lucienne "Lulu" Pelletier (Janie Marèse) that he fails to comprehend that she and her pimp boyfriend André 'Dédé' Jauguin (Georges Flamant) are taking advantage of him.
Renoir appoints no judgment on the protagonist; Fritz Lang took a…
The meek ain't gonna inherit shit
Cos I'll take it
--The Watts Prophets, "The Meek Ain't Gonna" (1969)
Totally tracks that the son of Pierre-August Renoir would spill all the tea about the Parisian art scene.
The puppet introduction, in which figures argue over whether the coming film is or isn’t a comedy with a moral or even just bicker about who has the right to speak, is a wonderfully funny, concise summary of Renoir’s larger approach to story and character across his entire career. His roving, deep-focus camera takes in sights as gorgeous as they are revealing (the Moulin Rouge windmill spinning in the distance outside the window of the opening company dinner, Lulu disappearing into ‘the lower depths,” you might say, walking down stairs away from Maurice). Later, light music plays over a shot of Maurice shaving, and the camera pans to reveal a young girl playing piano through the window of a flat…
Love the way that this introduces itself as a typical love triangle, then swiftly rejects the conventions of that kind of story and shifts into something more sinister: a dark reflection on the instrumentalization of relationships and the cruel consumerist corruptions of life’s greatest pleasures.
Beautiful early French cinema. A tale of love, betrayal, and longing—one every man faces, at least once in his lifetime.
Part of Essential Films To Watch
Part of The 2015 Project
"You're not woman, you're a bitch!"
La Chienne, also knows as The Bitch in English is one of the hardest films to get through, yet it's one of the most rewarding experiences ever. This film, though it consists of a story, is driven powerfully by its character study, both of Maurice (the naive old man) and Lulu (the conniving, self-serving girl). The film benefits from magnificent performances from its entire cast, boasting some of the best performances of the era. Though small in scale, and not historically regarded as Renoir's most important film, La Chienne is his most passionate film, whether driven through fictitious creativity or personal experience.
The…
There was so much to love about this movie. Most of all the way Michel Simon portrayed his character of a shell of a man into a mare ghost during the course of this movie being both a simple dignified man and undignified at the same time. Just human nature and it's temptations. Jean Renoir was one of the masters of cinema at the time and even with the arrival of sound he's still on top!
