Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir made a prisoner-of-war film with no villains and an aristocratic comedy so unwelcome that it was cut, banned and nearly lost. He was the second son of the painter Auguste Renoir, sat for him as a child, and financed his first films by selling his father's canvases. He was wounded in the leg in 1915, which left him with a permanent limp, and flew as an observer afterwards. La Grande Illusion in 1937 puts French officers and a German commandant in a war where class binds men more tightly than nationality does; Goebbels called it cinematic public enemy number one. La Regle du Jeu in 1939 was booed at its premiere, cut by the distributor, banned by both the French government and then the occupation, and its negative destroyed in a bombing; it was reconstructed in 1959 and is now routinely voted among the greatest films made. He left for Hollywood in 1940 and never fully fitted there. In 1949 he shot The River in Bengal, in colour, with a young Satyajit Ray helping to scout locations. He took American citizenship and wrote a book about his father. He made nine films in France in the 1930s, including Boudu Saved from Drowning and Toni, and worked for a time within the Popular Front, directing La Vie est a nous for the Communist Party. Truffaut and the Cahiers critics treated him as the central figure of French cinema and the auteur argument was partly built on his work. The River was shot in India with a largely non-professional cast and was Renoir s first colour film. He received an honorary Academy Award in 1975. My Life and My Films and the biography of his father are both still read. He died in Beverly Hills and is buried at Essoyes beside his family.

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