La Chienne (1931)

La Chienne (1931) is a French poetic realist film de pur génie puppet show de la vie misery of faked identities, Jean Renoir-noir Paris night-time street scenes murder and fated descent into tramping bummery, all round classique de poetic realism, classic film noir, and ardent ancient treasury of la cinematique-du-crime, in which a dupe is duped by a couple of unsympathetic street denizens of poverty struck human villainy wherein all you own are your clothes and your cigarettes, while also satirising the middle and business merchant class, and the art class, with its mendicant conclusion and historic remaking by Fritz Lang in the equally immortal and immoral bum-quest to the bottom that is Scarlet Street (1945)

Cette film la stars our best acteurs, Michel Simon, Janie Marèse and Georges Flamant.

One of the greats of film noir in its ancient provenance, and it might be the first ever film noir, that is what the denizens and the noireaux talk about when they get to the booths, is this the first fiulm noir, the first of all film noir? 

There are, oh yes indeed there are films which reveal their moral architecture in slow and devastating increments, and Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931) is one such work: a sly and bitter x-ray of bourgeois pretensions, a portrait of human weakness rendered with cruel lyricism. The narrative may, on its surface, seem familiar: a man deceived by love, trapped between social obligations and emotional yearning. 

Yet Renoir, yet the mighty Jean Renoir-de-noir transmutes this framework into something more elusive, more theatrical, and far more grotesque. This is not merely a morality tale. It is a sickened fable, draped in velvet shadows and stripped of pity.

Renoir, making his second sound film, crafts his drama around Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), a timid bank cashier who dreams of being a painter. Simon, whose face is a mosaic of helpless desire and crumpled dignity, delivers a performance of such raw authenticity that the character’s decline feels like a slow act of self-erasure. 

Legrand is suffocated by his marriage to the ghastly Adèle (Magdeleine Bérubet), a woman of exquisite cruelty who ridicules his art and humiliates him in public and private. Her perpetual invocation of her late husband, a soldier presumed dead in the Great War, establishes her position as both moral tyrant and specter of national trauma.

When Legrand meets Lucienne "Lulu" Pelletier (Janie Marèse), he is drawn not to her body but to her capacity to offer warmth, or the semblance of it. Lulu, a prostitute of limited cunning but remarkable instinct, manipulates Legrand with the unblinking assurance of someone who has lived too long in the margins. She is not alone. Her lover and pimp, Dédé (Georges Flamant), is a lizard-like presence: oily, abusive, and vacantly handsome. Together, they form a parasitic dyad that feeds on Legrand’s illusions.

It is important to linger on the film's release year: 1931. France was only just beginning to find its voice in sound cinema. The trauma of the First World War remained raw. The rise of fascism loomed in the distance. Economically, the country was beginning to reel from the effects of the global Depression. Against this backdrop, Renoir's film appears not merely cynical but prophetic. Its vision of institutional rot and personal desperation anticipates the malaise of an entire decade.

Renoir frames this tragedy with an introductory puppet show, a grotesque Punch and Judy spectacle that announces the tale as one of moral ambiguity. This framing device disavows the viewer of any simplistic reading: there are no heroes, only masks. The social order is itself a farce, its strings pulled by unseen but omnipotent hands. This theatricality extends to Renoir's compositions. Scenes are often staged in frames within frames: windows, doorways, mirrors. Characters are perpetually trapped—by architecture, by circumstance, by one another.

The murder, when it comes, is handled with an audacity that recalls the formal daring of silent cinema. We do not see the act. Instead, the camera remains outside the building, lingering on a street musician's mournful violin as the fatal blow is struck. Violence, Renoir suggests, is not spectacle but consequence. The act is less significant than the rot that precedes it.

The film's noir credentials are unmistakable, though they do not announce themselves in the manner of Hollywood. There are no Venetian blinds or trench coats. Instead, there is moral claustrophobia, fatalism, and the corrosive power of erotic delusion. 

Legrand, like so many noir protagonists to come, believes he can escape his life through the transformative power of desire. What he finds instead is spiritual extinction. One can trace a direct line from La Chienne to Scarlet Street (1945), Fritz Lang's Hollywood remake starring Edward G. Robinson. Yet while Lang's version is bound by the Production Code—its characters punished in precise, retributive fashion—Renoir's vision is disconcertingly amoral. Here, the wicked prosper, and the damaged are left to wander.

Morceau de tabac avec La Chienne (1931)

Michel Simon's Legrand is one of the most pitiable figures in French cinema. He stumbles through his own narrative like a man dreaming of water in a desert of cruelty. Simon, who also starred in Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), was capable of immense pathos shaded with grotesquerie. 

Janie Marèse, in her brief but indelible turn as Lulu, conveys the contradictions of a woman who is at once predator and victim. Tragically, Marèse died shortly after the film's premiere, in a car crash while riding with Flamant. This offscreen echo of the film’s toxic triangle only deepens its fatalism.

Flamant, meanwhile, brings a vacant menace to Dédé. His face is a blank page upon which others project fantasies of masculinity. His performance is all the more unnerving for its lack of performativity. Bérubet, as Adèle, completes the quartet with a portrait of shrill domestic tyranny. These four actors form a quadrangle of desire and revulsion, their performances as painterly and fractured as the canvases Legrand leaves behind.

The film's feminist implications are manifold. Adèle and Lulu represent two poles of female power: one rooted in social propriety, the other in sexual economy. Neither figure is permitted emotional complexity. They are rendered as instruments of humiliation or temptation, never as subjects of interiority. Yet Renoir, despite his claims to naturalism, is less interested in exploring gender than in depicting power’s corruption. The women in La Chienne are not liberated; they are merely different shades of ensnared. The same patriarchy that emasculates Legrand also flattens the women around him into objects of revulsion or consumption.

In the final act, Legrand has become a tramp, cast adrift from all structures of order. His paintings, once symbols of his inner life, have been commodified and misattributed. His crime has gone unpunished. And yet his punishment is absolute: not incarceration but erasure. He has ceased to be a person. This final transformation places La Chienne squarely within the noir tradition, albeit refracted through Renoir's own brand of tragic comedy. The ending, in which Legrand blithely discusses his past with a fellow vagrant, carries a note of breezy nihilism that is both horrifying and liberating.

As well as some textbook classic old time scrappa-tabacca this is among the earliest gangsters in pyjamas scenes in all of vieux noir — La Chienne (1931)

The influence of La Chienne on noir is substantial, if often unacknowledged. It establishes the thematic grammar of the genre: sexual manipulation, emasculation, economic despair, and the inescapability of fate. But it does so with a visual elegance that anticipates not just noir but the poetic realism of Marcel Carné and the chiaroscuro of American crime films. The interiors are claustrophobic. The exteriors are lonely. The characters are always viewed from a distance—as though Renoir himself cannot bear to get too close.

In the wider narrative of American history, La Chienne remains a European artifact that speaks fluently to transatlantic anxieties. The themes of emasculation, false domesticity, and erotic treachery would find fertile soil in postwar America, where noir flourished amidst suburban discontent and Cold War paranoia.

Voici Janie Marèse, born Jeanne Marie Thérèse Bugnot, 23 May 1908, died 14 August 1931  (aged 23) in Saint-Tropez.

Janie Marèse was a French actress who appeared in four shorts and three feature-length films, most notably Jean Renoir's second sound film La Chienne, before her death at age 23, in a road accident.

Marèse made her first screen appearance in a 1929 short, C'est par amour pour vous Madame. Her first full-length feature was Amours viennoises in 1930, followed by the Marc Allégret-directed adaptation of Mam'zelle Nitouche.

Marèse's break came when she was offered the leading role (originally intended for Catherine Hessling) in Renoir's La Chienne (The Bitch), in which she played Lulu, a prostitute who connives with her pimp and lover (Georges Flamant) to financially exploit an unhappily married man (Michel Simon) who has fallen in love with her. Marèse's performance was well received and seemed to mark the start of a potentially successful career.

Shortly after the completion of La Chienne, Marèse was travelling on the French Riviera in a car driven by her co-star Georges Flamant when Flamant lost control of the vehicle, which overturned, killing Marèse instantly. Flamant survived the accident. 

The French media, shocked by the untimely death of a promising young talent, subsequently vilified Flamant (he was labelled "un assassin" by some newspapers) to the extent that his career was seriously damaged by negative public perception.

Renoir, whose later work in Hollywood would struggle against the constraints of the studio system, offered here a vision too ungoverned for American screens. And yet its spiritual offspring proliferated: in the doomed romances of Double Indemnity (1944), the psychic collapse of Detour (1945), and the erotic betrayals of Gilda (1946).

To speak of cinema as a moral architecture unfolding incrementally is to acknowledge that certain films resist the obviousness of didacticism. They do not instruct with blunt gestures but rather corrode with patience, permitting their ethical scaffolding to reveal itself in slow collapse. Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) is exemplary in this regard, a work whose corrosive lyricism exposes bourgeois pretensions with forensic malice. 

It is not merely a story of adultery, humiliation, and murder. It is, instead, what I have elsewhere termed “un conte malade” —a sickened fable clothed in shadows that shimmer with velvet indifference.

At first glance, the narrative is distressingly banal. A timid man, deceived by love, wanders into a labyrinth where social obligation clashes with emotional yearning. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this might serve as a morality tale of seduction and downfall. Renoir, however, transforms the scenario into a grotesque theatre of cruelty. 

He renders the familiar uncanny. He strips pity from the scene, allowing only the detritus of human weakness. One might even say, “la banalité se métamorphose en horreur,” for the ordinary is here subjected to alchemical exaggeration until it becomes unbearable.

In attempting to delineate the genealogy of film noir, it is necessary to begin not in America, but in France, with the elusive and in many ways ineffable cinematic formation known as poetic realism. As one critic has observed, “arguably the focus of identification for an entire nation, Jean Gabin condenses the poetic realist optique into a single figure.” 

To put it in my own French terms: « le regard poétique se cristallise dans la personne de Gabin, véritable condensateur d’une mythologie nationale ». These films, enormously popular in the 1930s, are marked by a dark fatalism, by the implacable hand of destiny, and by their attention to the tragic plight of the working-class hero. 

This hero is so often portrayed by Gabin that one might say poetic realism could scarcely exist without his iconic visage. He appears beside a rotating array of women who oscillate between innocent ingénues and more fatale-like incarnations of desire, often driving him toward the abyss.

The defining characteristic of poetic realism is its paradoxical combination of realist settings with a profoundly symbolic mise-en-scène. It weds the banality of working-class docklands, railway yards, and cramped garrets with an aesthetic strategy wherein décor, lighting, music, and dialogue are marshalled into resonant allegories of fate. 

The films are frequently adapted from Francophone novelists such as Georges Simenon, Pierre Véry, and Pierre Mac Orlan, or scripted by Jacques Prévert, whose celebrated poetic concision turned dialogue into what one might call destiny made audible. Already in the 1930s, some commentators noted that these films should be considered noir in embryonic form, « noirs avant la lettre », to borrow my own phrasing.

The trajectory from poetic realism to American film noir is not an accident of aesthetic kinship, but a direct transference mediated by émigré directors. Many of them were Jewish artists and technicians, fleeing the encroaching spectre of Nazism, who carried with them not merely their craft but also the poetic realist sensibility. 

Among them were Wilder, Siodmak, Lang, Litvak, and Ophüls. Fritz Lang in particular would later return to the very narratives first staged in France, producing reimaginings in the context of Hollywood noir. Jacques Tourneur, a French-born director naturalised in America, illustrates the transatlantic transmission of this cinematic mode with particular force. He directed such classic noirs as Experiment Perilous (1944) and Out of the Past (1947). In short, these émigrés functioned, as one scholar noted, as “prime carriers of poetic realism into the noir aesthetic.”

The phenomenon is made most palpable in the cycle of Hollywood remakes of French poetic realist works in the 1940s and 1950s. The process of remaking illuminates the cultural translation that occurred between the fatalistic mood of French cinema and the comparatively more pragmatic ethos of American popular culture. 

For instance, Le jour se lève (1939), directed by Marcel Carné, stages the claustrophobic demise of François, a working-class hero played by Gabin, who, having murdered a corrupt sexual predator, finds himself cornered by police in his garret. Refusing to submit to an oppressive justice system, he commits suicide, thereby embodying the fatalist logic of poetic realism.

Litvak’s American remake, The Long Night (1947), replaces Gabin with Henry Fonda, and crucially alters the denouement: the American hero is persuaded by a strong modern woman to surrender, thereby opening the possibility of redemption. In this transformation, one perceives the translation from tragic French fatalism to American optimism, or at least faith in procedural justice.

The relationship between poetic realism and its émigré successors is further exemplified in adaptations of canonical texts. Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), itself adapted from Zola, was later remade by Lang in Hollywood as Human Desire (1954). 

This transmutation represents not only the persistence of narrative motifs, but also the deepening of fatalistic structures into the American noir imagination. Similarly, Pierre Chenal’s neglected but seminal adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, titled Le dernier tournant (1939), was re-adapted as Visconti’s neo-realist Ossessione (1943) and subsequently in Hollywood by Tay Garnett in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). 

What appears here is less a linear evolution than a palimpsest of intertextual adaptations, each re-inscribing fatalism according to national ideological demands. « Le cinéma est toujours une traduction, et chaque traduction trahit », as I would say.

If Gabin is the crystallised essence of poetic realism, the women who accompany him are equally determinative of its structures. Late 1930s films starring Gabin repeatedly deploy four archetypal feminine figures, each of which carries within it the seeds of fatality. 

The ingénue, most frequently a lost or endangered virgin, is exemplified by Jacqueline Laurent’s Françoise in Le jour se lève (1939) or Michèle Morgan’s Nelly in Quai des Brumes (1938). These figures are invariably separated from their male counterparts, whether through malign antagonists or the inexorability of fate. They embody innocence threatened by corruption, and their loss functions as the tragic motor of the narrative.

Counterbalancing the ingénue is the worldly woman of the people, the generous tart, who, though often coded as socially marginal, possesses a warmth and generosity lacking in the ingénue’s ethereal fragility. Arletty in Le jour se lève provides the paradigmatic instance of this type. In stark contrast, one encounters the garce, or scheming, venal woman, whose duplicity links sexuality with financial gain, epitomised by Viviane Romance in La belle équipe (1936). 

Finally, the vamp represents the allure of sophistication and erotic danger, conflating sexual desirability with social mobility, as in Mireille Balin’s role in Pépé le Moko (1937). Sometimes the vamp becomes the high-class garce, the proverbial « riche garce », as Balin portrays in Gueule d’Amour (1938). These figures demonstrate that femininity in poetic realism is neither monolithic nor stable, but rather an unstable field through which the male hero negotiates his fatal destiny.

It is crucial to recognise that the fatale, in her many guises, functions as the narrative motor of poetic realism. She impels the hero to sacrifice social obligations, abandon professional duties, and sever himself from the bonds of male camaraderie. In so doing, she precipitates his downfall. Michel Azzopardi, in his study of the French vamp, underscores her emotional frigidity and her siren-like demand for total allegiance. 

Like the American “spider woman,” she is less an individual than an archetype, a belle dame sans merci, whose function is to enact man’s fall. « Elle ne donne rien, sinon l’illusion de sa possession ». This logic places her not in the realm of mutual love, but in that of temptation, damnation, and loss.

Yet, one must be cautious. The poetic realist fatale, while resonant with the femme fatale of American noir, cannot be reduced to misogynistic caricature. As Burch and Sellier have argued in their magisterial study of French cinema from 1930 to 1956, the truly oppressive figure is not so much the ruthless garce or vamp, but the Bad Father, the patriarchal antagonist, whether literally incestuous or metaphorically oppressive. 

Their claim is that the garce proliferates in order to mask, or perhaps displace, anxieties about paternal authority. In other words, misogyny exists, but it is refracted through the prism of patriarchal domination. My own conclusion, therefore, is that the most representative female figure of poetic realism is not the cold vamp, but rather the ingénue or good-bad girl, figures who, like the hero himself, are marginalised by polite society.

Poetic realism, then, is proto-noir not because it already contains the clichés of shadowed alleyways and venetian blinds, but because it encodes fatalism, desire, and betrayal as constitutive features of modern life. These films offer not escape but confrontation, a cinematic poetry of despair.

They are deeply French in their sensitivity to class, love, and fate, but they are also, paradoxically, universal. It is no accident that the fatalism of poetic realism could so easily migrate to Hollywood, where émigrés translated its aesthetics into a new cinematic idiom. One could say: « Le réalisme poétique est l’ancêtre du film noir, non par imitation, mais par contamination ». That contamination gave rise to an aesthetic that would dominate postwar American cinema, and in turn return to Europe as a mirror of its own despair.

In sum, poetic realism functions simultaneously as culmination and origin: culmination of the interwar French sensibility that combined working-class tragedy with lyrical stylisation, and origin of the fatalistic universe of film noir. Through Gabin, Prévert, Carné, Renoir, and their émigré successors, it forged a cinema that articulated the modern condition as irrevocably tragic, and in so doing, laid the groundwork for noir’s moral universe. 

If the French films ended in suicide and despair, the American remakes often allowed for compromise or redemption, yet the fundamental structure of fatalism persisted. To recognise this is to acknowledge that the cinema of shadows was born not in Los Angeles, but in Paris, Marseille, and Le Havre. And to that, I would only add: « c’est en France que le noir a trouvé sa première lumière ».

The protagonist, Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), is a man so oppressed by timidity that his very existence appears provisional. His one desire, painting, exists as a secret rebellion against a world that mocks him. Simon’s performance conveys a face that is both a mask and a ruin: crumpled dignity set against a mosaic of helpless desire. 

The spectator cannot watch his decline without sensing an eerie act of self-erasure. The Domestic Tyranny of Adèle is c'est noir, it is c'est noir, the subdued and weakened human male home man and best of all a DOUBLE LOUSY HUSBAND FEATURE.

Could it be argued that the first film noir ever made was a double lousy husband feature? What a classic film noir, this is the life, signature quality comforting 200 year guaranteed film noir.

At home, Legrand is shackled to Adèle (Magdeleine Bérubet), a woman of such exquisite cruelty that she transcends caricature. Her ridicule of his art is merciless, and her constant evocation of her first husband—an officer presumed killed in the Great War—casts her as both tyrant and necromancer. In her, one perceives the intimate domestic theater of humiliation fused with the unresolved trauma of national catastrophe. As I remarked in a recent lecture, “le traumatisme collectif habite les cuisines et les chambres à coucher,” the collective wound inhabits kitchens and bedrooms as much as battlefields.

Into this suffocating domesticity wanders Lucienne “Lulu” Pelletier (Janie Marèse). She is a prostitute of modest cunning but extraordinary instinct, a figure who manipulates with the natural assurance of one who has long survived in the margins. Legrand is drawn less to her body than to the illusion of warmth she offers. 

Lulu’s world, however, is entwined with Dédé (Georges Flamant), her lover and pimp, whose lizard-like presence contaminates every gesture with oily brutality. Together, Lulu and Dédé constitute what I would term a parasitic dyad, feeding upon Legrand’s illusions until nothing remains.

The year of the film’s release, 1931, is of particular consequence. France was only beginning to discover its cinematic voice in the sound era, even as the nation remained saturated with postwar trauma. Economically, the Depression was beginning to gnaw at its foundations. Politically, the shadow of fascism hovered in the near distance. La Chienne thus emerges as a prophetic artifact, its cynicism forecasting an entire decade’s malaise. Renoir was not simply depicting personal weakness but diagnosing a civilization in slow decay. As I have written, “le pessimisme est ici une prophétie.”

Renoir’s formal audacity begins at the threshold, with a puppet show. The grotesque Punch-and-Judy figures introduce the narrative, explicitly instructing us that what follows is neither moral tale nor allegory but a cruel comedy of masks. This meta-theatrical device insists that there will be no heroes. All are caricatures, manipulated by invisible forces.

The drama of La Chienne (1931) does not end within the contours of its diegesis; it bleeds into the lives of its actors, contaminating reality itself. Michel Simon, whose portrayal of Maurice Legrand embodies the very essence of abjection, found himself captivated off-screen by Janie Marèse, the actress who incarnated Lulu. 

His attachment, rooted in both tenderness and obsession, mirrored the emotional dependency of his character. Yet Marèse, in a cruel irony, reciprocated not his affections but those of Georges Flamant, the inexperienced performer entrusted with the role of Dédé, her cinematic pimp. As I often remind myself, « La fiction ne fait jamais que dévoiler les vérités les plus cruelles de la vie. »

Renoir and producer Pierre Braunberger, seeking to extract performances of maximum authenticity, actively encouraged the liaison between Marèse and Flamant. This manipulation was itself a directorial technique, an instrumentalization of eros in the service of cinema. 

Flamant, for whom La Chienne (1931) marked his inaugural appearance on screen, embodied not merely the character of a pimp but the raw inexperience of a novice intoxicated by circumstance. The conflation of actor and role, of life and representation, is emblematic of what I call the aesthetic of cruelty. « L’art n’imite pas la vie, il l’aggrave, » I have written, and here the proof is tragically irrefutable.

When the production concluded, the off-screen romance persisted, but in a fatal form. Flamant, barely competent behind the wheel, took Marèse for a drive. The journey ended in catastrophe: he lost control, and the young actress was killed. In this accident, one perceives not randomness but destiny, as though the very narrative of La Chienne (1931) had demanded a sacrifice in order to confirm its truth. It is the classical tragedy reconfigured for the age of cinema.

At the funeral, Simon collapsed in grief, fainting as he passed the grave. His despair was not theatrical but ontological, the collapse of a man who could not distinguish between the loss of his beloved and the death of the character she had embodied. He turned against Renoir, whom he held personally accountable. 

Armed with a revolver, he confronted the director, declaring that Marèse’s death was entirely his fault. Renoir, with the calm detachment of an artist who recognizes the price of creation, responded: “Kill me if you like, but I have made the film.” 

This declaration exemplifies the brutal autonomy of art: the film exists, and nothing—not grief, not violence—can undo it. As I remarked when annotating this episode, « L’œuvre exige du sang, et l’artiste ne recule jamais. »

Thus the off-screen tragedy of La Chienne (1931) serves as an extension of its thematic concerns. Just as Maurice’s paintings achieve recognition only through fraud, and just as Lulu’s love is revealed as deception, so too the lives of the actors were manipulated, deceived, and ultimately destroyed in the name of authenticity. The death of Janie Marèse is not an accident external to the work; it is the logical consequence of a cinematic process that subordinates human beings to the imperatives of representation. It is not simply that life imitates art, but rather that art consumes life in order to assert its sovereignty.

This insistence on theatricality extends to Renoir’s visual design. Characters appear trapped in frames within frames: mirrors, doorways, windows. They are enclosed not merely by architecture but by their own entrapments. To paraphrase myself, “les murs sont les complices du destin,” the walls themselves are accomplices of fate.

When murder finally intrudes, it does so obliquely. The spectator is denied the spectacle of violence. The camera lingers instead on the mournful tones of a street violinist as the fatal blow is struck beyond our view. Here Renoir recalls the moral daring of silent cinema, where implication replaces exposition. Violence, in this universe, is not an eruption but an inevitability.

One is tempted to describe La Chienne as an embryonic noir. Yet its noir qualities are not those of American cinema with its Venetian blinds and trench-coated detectives. Rather, they reside in the moral claustrophobia, the inexorable fatalism, the erotic delusion that corrodes the soul. Legrand dreams of transformation through desire, only to find extinction instead. 

A direct line may be drawn from this film to Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), its Hollywood remake. Yet where Lang was fettered by the Production Code, Renoir permitted wickedness to prosper unpunished. His vision is not simply immoral; it is amoral, destabilizing the very premise of retributive justice.

The actors, four in number, form a perverse quadrangle of desire and revulsion. Michel Simon’s Legrand stumbles through the narrative like a parched figure hallucinating salvation. Janie Marèse, in her brief yet incandescent role, embodies both predator and victim with equal intensity. 

Her tragic death in an automobile accident shortly after the film’s premiere, while in the company of Flamant, perversely echoes the toxic entanglements of the film itself. Flamant as Dédé exudes a blank menace, his very vacancy unnerving. And Bérubet as Adèle reigns as the shrill despot of the home, an avatar of domestic tyranny. Together, they enact a danse macabre of humiliation and longing.

It would be facile to read La Chienne as feminist, yet the film does position women as pivotal sites of power. Adèle wields her authority through social respectability; Lulu manipulates through erotic commerce. 

Yet both are flattened into functions—tyranny and temptation—rather than subjects of interiority. Renoir, despite his reputed naturalism, seems more compelled by power than by gender. The patriarchy humiliates Legrand but simultaneously objectifies and imprisons the women. In this sense, “les femmes ne sont pas libérées, mais piégées autrement.”

By the film’s conclusion, Legrand has drifted into vagabondage. His crime has gone unpunished in juridical terms, yet his punishment is more profound: he is erased. His paintings have been commodified and misattributed; his identity has evaporated.

He becomes, in essence, nothing. This conclusion situates the film securely within a noir lineage, though one refracted through Renoir’s tragicomic sensibility. The breezy nihilism of the final dialogue between two vagrants is at once horrifying and liberating, a note of cruel levity that annihilates all consolation.

Though rarely acknowledged, the film’s influence on noir is substantial. Its grammar—erotic manipulation, emasculation, economic despair, inescapable fate—would reverberate across decades of American cinema. 

Renoir anticipates both the poetic realism of Marcel Carné and the chiaroscuro of Hollywood crime films. His interiors suffocate. His exteriors isolate. His characters remain at a distance, as if the camera itself recoils from intimacy.

Indeed, when one considers the postwar flourishing of noir in America, that means like Double Indemnity (1944), Detour (1945), Gilda (1946), you know those ones lol, one hears echoes of Renoir’s vision. That these films emerged in a climate of suburban malaise and Cold War paranoia testifies to the universality of his diagnosis. Renoir, constrained in his later Hollywood career, had already articulated the essence of noir before America found the language for it.

Renoir’s genius resided not merely in humanism but in his willingness to stage humanism within grotesquerie. His Paris is a stage of cruelty. His characters are not tragic figures but pitiful animals caught in snares of their own making. And yet, paradoxically, the film refuses total cynicism. There is tenderness in the lie, grace in the fall, beauty even in the spectacle of ruin.

To witness La Chienne is to descend into the abyss of human delusion. It is to observe a man who mistook affection for redemption, who painted his yearning upon the world only to see it commodified into betrayal. It is to realize that the most terrible crimes are not those punished by law but those consecrated by love itself. In my own words, “le crime suprême est sanctifié par l’amour.”

The genius of Renoir lies not merely in his humanism, but in his ability to frame that humanism within grotesquerie. His Paris is not a city of light but a stage for performative cruelty. His characters are not tragic heroes but foolish beasts. And yet the film refuses to be wholly cynical. There is tenderness in the lie. There is grace in the fall.

Maintenant La Realisme C'est Poetique

"French poetic realism was one of the defining movements of 1930s French cinema, blending stylized visual beauty with bleak narratives of working-class lives, doomed love, and fatalistic endings," says film historian Renée Carl Snysterrates. "It set the stage for postwar Italian neorealism and it set the stage, yes paved the way, lit the cigarette . . . of film noir." Here are the main classics of French poetic realism, mais oui, oh yeah:

• La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931) – Often cited as an early precursor, a tale of sexual obsession and downfall.

• Zéro de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933) – Vigo’s anarchic boarding school rebellion, lyrical and dreamlike.

• L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) – The quintessential poetic realist work: a working-class love story on a barge, drenched in lyricism and melancholy.

• Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935) – Shot on location, mixing documentary-like realism with tragic melodrama.

• Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937) – Gangster fatalism, with Jean Gabin as the doomed romantic outlaw in Algiers.

• La Belle Équipe (Julien Duvivier, 1936) – Working-class utopian dream collapsing under harsh realities.

• Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936) – A mix of social optimism and fatalism, tied to Popular Front ideals.

• La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) – Antiwar classic, lyrical, humane, and political.

• La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938) – Jean Gabin as the tormented railway worker, driven to murder by fate.

• Quai des brumes (Marcel Carné, 1938) – Archetypal poetic realism: foggy ports, lost soldiers, doomed romance.

• Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) – Flashback-driven tragedy, with Gabin as a murderer trapped in his room.

To watch La Chienne is to descend into the abyss of emotional self-delusion. It is to witness a man who mistook affection for salvation, who painted his longing into corners and found that desire, once commodified, can only betray. It is, finally, to see that the most brutal crimes are not those punished by the law, but those sanctioned by love.

The relation between Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) and Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), when considered in light of Lang’s immediately preceding The Woman in the Window (1944), constitutes a tripartite dialogue, or rather a cultural palimpsest. 

Each film layers upon the other, not merely in the realm of narrative but in its deployment of sound as a carrier of meaning. Renoir’s acoustic plenitude and Lang’s ascetic aural precision are opposed strategies, yet their opposition generates a productive tension. As I have elsewhere written, « le son devient un champ de bataille esthétique »—sound becomes an aesthetic battlefield.

When one director of canonical stature remakes another, divergences inevitably arise. Renoir and Lang, whose sensibilities diverge on virtually every aesthetic and methodological issue, provide a particularly illuminating case. The resulting films are not simply variant iterations of a shared text but rather manifestos of incompatible philosophies. 

Renoir embraced chaos, simultaneity, and excess; Lang imposed schematic control, repetition, and rigor. In short, La Chienne luxuriates in an ambient density that foregrounds life’s cacophony, whereas Scarlet Street enacts a discipline of sound that insists upon fatal entrapment. To invoke my own formulation, « Renoir laisse entrer le monde par les oreilles; Lang les ferme hermétiquement »—Renoir lets the world enter through the ears; Lang seals them shut.

Thomas Leitch’s notion of the remake as a triangular structure—literary source, filmic translation, and subsequent cinematic re-presentation—serves aptly here, though Lang complicates the geometry. For Scarlet Street does not merely retranslate Renoir’s La Chienne; it also restages Lang’s own The Woman in the Window. 

The “triangle” therefore swells into a polyhedron of intertextuality. Indeed, Lang’s insistence that he wished to make “a new film and not a copy” should not be read as a disavowal of ancestry but rather as a rhetorical mask. He sought both to erase and to reinscribe Renoir, while simultaneously correcting what he perceived as structural weaknesses in his own prior work. 

One might say, « Lang ne copiait pas, il corrigeait »—Lang was not copying, he was correcting.

Hollywood’s long delay in adapting Renoir’s film underscores this complexity. Ernst Lubitsch himself tinkered with drafts but abandoned the project, unable to reconcile the Breen Office’s censorship strictures with the fatal eroticism of the story.

Only Lang, in wartime America, found the configuration viable. His semi-independent Diana Productions, in collaboration with Walter Wanger and Joan Bennett, framed the enterprise not as mimicry but as reclamation. Yet reclamation, as always, required disavowal: Renoir’s “foreign” disorder was refashioned into Lang’s American fatalism.

Renoir’s credo—“One starts with the environment to arrive at the self”—animates La Chienne. His soundtrack is nothing less than a sonic ecosystem. The café scenes, for example, overflow with scraping chairs, clinking glasses, murmured conversations, and the intrusive strains of a mechanical piano. 

These noises do not advance plot in a narrow sense but rather thicken the world, embedding characters within a field of social contingency. Renoir, ever suspicious of abstraction, insisted upon the particular. « Sans le détail sonore, il n’y a pas de vérité »—without sonic detail, there is no truth.

Equally telling is Renoir’s use of off-screen sound. The pianist in the neighboring apartment, whose notes seep into Legrand’s domestic scenes, performs a contrapuntal commentary. Their presence insists that private misery is never wholly private but resonates across walls and into the ears of others.

Such sonic bleed creates an extended world beyond the frame, an acoustic openness consistent with Renoir’s visual mise-en-scène. His sound practice was thus not auxiliary but constitutive: voice, noise, and music intermingled to reveal character indirectly, through environment.

Even class distinction emerges through vocal registers. Lulu’s whiny tones, Adèle’s shrill nagging, and Dédé’s swaggering slang demarcate the social field. Renoir’s attention to vocal timbre, pitch, and accent translates social hierarchy into sonic material. In this way, « la voix devient destin »—voice becomes destiny. No wonder André Bazin praised La Chienne for its seeming improvisation, which only masked Renoir’s orchestration of vocal authenticity.

By contrast, Lang’s sonic strategy in Scarlet Street is minimalist yet obsessive. Every sound has a function, every echo a significance. Ambient noise is pared away; what remains is dialogue sharpened into traps and repetitions that reverberate with fatal consequences. 

Whereas Renoir’s soundscape invites distraction, Lang’s forbids it. As I have remarked, « Lang n’admet pas le bruit du monde, seulement l’écho de la culpabilité »—Lang admits not the noise of the world, only the echo of guilt.

A paradigmatic instance occurs in the bird-song scene. A robin’s trill prompts Chris Cross’s declaration of rejuvenated feeling, a brief moment of natural communion. Yet Kitty, whose name evokes predation, mocks and eventually consumes this sentiment. 

The bird’s song, in Renoir, might have been one note in a cacophonous chorus; in Lang, it is an omen, meticulously integrated into the symbolic economy of betrayal. The sound’s repetition later—Kitty parroting Chris’s words to art critics—demonstrates Lang’s fascination with echo as deception. For him, repetition is not natural but diabolical.

Even more striking is Lang’s use of subjective-internal sound. The voices of Kitty and Johnny haunt Chris after their deaths, taunting him in distorted, overlapping cadences. Records skip, neon signs buzz, and these noises bleed into Chris’s consciousness, producing an auditory hallucination of guilt. This is no Renoirian openness but rather an acoustic prison. « Le son devient folie »—sound becomes madness.

The Woman in the Window serves as an indispensable prelude to this strategy. There, clocks tick, car horns blare, and mechanical noises recur as threats, externalizing the protagonist’s sense of impending exposure. Lang shrinks the auditory field to what the guilty man hears, thereby aligning spectator frustration with character anxiety. 

Repetition here signifies inevitability; every sound threatens to reveal, every echo enacts destiny. This system reappears, intensified, in Scarlet Street, where subjective voices intrude endlessly, dramatizing the irreparable fracture of the self.

The juxtaposition of Renoir and Lang thus dramatizes two opposed ontologies of cinema sound. Renoir’s layered soundtrack testifies to a faith in life’s irreducible multiplicity. He welcomed contingency, celebrated distraction, and insisted that narrative clarity must wrestle with environmental noise.

Ici interessant: 

Sound Strategies: Lang's Rearticulation of Renoir

Tricia Welsch

Cinema Journal

Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 51-65 (15 pages)

Published By: University of Texas Press

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225533

Lang, by contrast, disciplined sound into a closed system of reverberation. His method was forensic, each noise a clue, each repetition a verdict. If Renoir “kept faith with chaos,” as one critic observed, Lang kept faith with fatality. One might synthesize the contrast as follows: « Renoir élargit, Lang resserre »—Renoir expands, Lang tightens.

The irony is palpable: Lang’s remake of La Chienne is itself a repetition, and within the diegesis, sound repeats obsessively. Remake and motif converge in an economy of duplication. Lang’s willingness to remake his own The Woman in the Window alongside Renoir’s narrative underscores this doubling. 

 

It is no accident that both films pivot on middle-aged men entrapped by desire and undone by sound. The structure itself is recursive: repetition thematized, repeated, and materialized.

What emerges, finally, is a tale of two philosophies. Renoir sought to reproduce the density of lived experience through sound, granting voice to the incidental and the accidental. Lang sought to impose order, using sound to foreclose possibilities and script destiny. If Renoir painted with the ear, Lang engraved with it. 

To cite myself once more, « l’oreille renoirienne entend le monde; l’oreille langienne n’entend que son propre écho »—the Renoirian ear hears the world; the Langian ear hears only its own echo.

Thus, Scarlet Street becomes not merely a remake of La Chienne but also a manifesto against it. In sound as in narrative, Lang rearticulates Renoir by negation, producing a claustrophobic chamber in place of Renoir’s open café. The “new film” Lang promised was indeed new, but its novelty was forged through repetition, echo, and haunting. In the end, sound itself becomes destiny. 

It is not exactly proto-noir because it is in fact I reckon full-formed full-fat classic film noir. 

La Chienne (1931)

Directed by Jean Renoir

Genres - Crime, Drama  |   Release Date - Nov 20, 1931  |   Run Time - 91 min.  |  Partly yogo c'est La Chienne (1931) en Wiki