64: Boudu Saved from Drowning

Boudu sauvé des eaux

FR  84m  Dir: Jean Renoir  Key Cast: Michel Simon

It's interesting how some films feel utterly timeless and still work in much the same way ninety years later as they did upon release whereas others feel very much left behind in the year they were made. Boudu Saved from Drowning very much fits in the latter category, feeling very much like a portrait of pre-war France. 

Bookseller Lestingois spots tramp Boudu about to jump into the Seine through his window and rushes out to save the man from drowning. Boudu is brought to live with Lestingois, his wife and their maid Chloe Ann Marie and is an utter bastard, destroying things in their house, seducing the maid (who Lestingois was also having an affair with) and raping Mrs Lestingois. 

Boudu is perhaps the most detestable character I've seen on screen. There's certainly some shared DNA with Chaplin's Little Tramp character but Chaplin also made his tramp likeable with a good heart whereas Boudu appears to have no heart at all. Fascinatingly, actor Michel Simon didn't seem to require much acting to take on the role as this extract from Wikipedia suggests:

Michel Simon was at various times, a boxer, a boxing instructor, a right-wing anarchist, a frequenter of prostitutes, pimps and petty crooks. He was extremely well read, a talented photographer, a hypochondriac, a misanthrope, owner of a vast collection of pornography and with a reputation for unorthodox sexual behaviour which he did not bother to deny.

Director Jean Renoir even said that Simon had "...a good deal of Boudu in him". 

I really disliked the ending which feels tacked on and when reading up I discovered it actually was added. The play ends with Boudu marrying Chloe Ann Marie but in the film there's a subsequent sequence where Boudu capsizes the rowing boat the wedding party are on and drifts back to a life of vagrancy. Personally I would have had Boudu end of drowning, the universe's way of saying 'we gave you a chance to be a good person and you utterly failed'. 

I understood what the film was doing but a social satire for a society that feels so different is pretty difficult to access. It's certainly well-made other than the tacked on ending but this is a film which feels like it is best left to the 30s.