El crimen del Sr. Lange

Delightful! I'm a great fan of Jean Renoir, and I was very pleased to see this early piece as part of the excellent boxed set of 3 now available on DVD. It has its faults, but I love the way that he lets his actors "do their thing" and lives with the resultant somewhat chaotic mis en scene. The characters are great, with Jules Berry outdoing every caddish scoundrel I've ever seen on film (even including Terry -Thomas!). There's so much fun evident in the making of it, the rather slight fairy-story plot fills the bill perfectly, so it's like watching an early Hitchcock like "Young and Innocent". Lots of the same sense of fun finds its way into Renoir's later, more profound pieces like La Grande Illusion and Les Regles du Jeu, and help make those the more human by not being too sententious.