Stranger Says:

The 1930s were good to French director Jean Renoir. In that decade, which was between the world-historical stock-market crash and the war that would break Europe’s back, Renoir directed two classics of cinema: The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. The year before the former was completed, 1936, Renoir directed a very lovely comedy about Parisian pulp writers, a capitalist publisher (and sex predator), and a socialist project (a cooperative of pulp writers) that seemed promising. The photography in The Crime of Monsieur Lange is often mesmerizing, and when Renoir’s characters walk down a street, or into a room, or up a staircase, they move with the lightness and sway of dancers.