Boudu Saved from Drowning

Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux, 1932) is Jean Renoir's classic French comedy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A Parisian tramp named Boudu throws himself off a bridge into the Seine in despair, only to be fished out by Edouard Lestingois, a comfortable bookseller.

His rescuer decides to civilize the stray: takes him home, seats him at the table, sets about teaching him manners. Boudu repays this in his own fashion, spitting on the books, making passes at both the wife and the maid, and tipping the prim bourgeois household clean over. Michel Simon plays him as a force of nature that no one can tame or evict, in one of the liveliest performances early cinema ever captured. The longer the good deed drags on, the clearer it gets who really saved whom.

Renoir shot along the actual quays of early-1930s Paris, and the city breathes through every frame. Beneath the light comedy sits a tart jab at the well-fed middle class and its notion of order. Decades later the story would spark Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills. One for anyone drawn to early sound-era European film and a streak of anarchic mischief. Stream Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) online on iFILM.