Synopsis
La Chienne (1931) is Jean Renoir's French crime drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It was one of the director's first sound films and remains a quiet landmark of early French cinema.
Maurice Legrand is a middle-aged cashier who endures a bullying wife at home and paints canvases at night without daring to call himself an artist. A chance encounter on the street brings him Lulu, and he takes her for the great, late love of his life. In truth Lulu is a streetwalker devoted to her pimp Dédé, and she sees the timid clerk as nothing more than a wallet. Meanwhile Legrand's paintings begin to sell — under someone else's name.
Michel Simon plays the lead, and his Legrand is no simple fool of a victim: his humiliation curdles, at last, into something cold and decisive. Renoir filmed in the actual streets of Paris with the city's noise alive on the soundtrack, more than a decade before Fritz Lang reworked the same plot as Scarlet Street. Hard, ironic, free of any sentiment. Stream La Chienne (1931) online on iFILM.
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