International success in the 1930s
During the 1930s Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In 1931 he directed his first sound films, On purge bébé (Baby's Laxative) and La Chienne (The Bitch). The following year he made Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux), a farcical sendup of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family, who meet with comic, and ultimately disastrous, results when they attempt to reform a vagrant played by Michel Simon. In 1934, he filmed an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857). His 1935 film Toni, shot on locations with a nonprofessional cast, was later an influence on the French New Wave.
By the middle of the decade, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front. Several of his films, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935), Life Belongs to Us (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938), reflect the movement's politics.
In 1937, he made La Grande Illusion, one of his best-known films, starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin. A film on the theme of brotherhood, relating a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful. It was banned in Germany, and later in Italy, after having won the Best Artistic Ensemble award at the Venice Film Festival. It was the first foreign language film to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1938, the Nazis disrupted a showing of La Grande Illusion. Renoir reflected, "This is a story that fills me with real pride."
He followed it with The Human Beast (La Bête Humaine) (1938), a film noir and tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Gabin and Simone Simon. It too was a success.
In 1939, able to co-finance his own films, Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast. Renoir played the character Octave, who serves to connect characters from different social strata. The film was his greatest commercial failure, met with derision by Parisian audiences at its premiere. He extensively reedited the work, but without success at the time.
A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned by the government. Renoir was a known pacifist and supporter of the French Communist Party, which made him suspect in the tense weeks before the war began. The ban was lifted briefly in 1940, but after the fall of France that June, it was banned again. Subsequently, the original negative of the film was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. It was not until the 1950s that French film enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, with Renoir's cooperation, reconstructed a near-complete print of the film. Since that time, The Rules of the Game has been reappraised and has frequently appeared near the top of critics' polls of the best films ever made.
A week after the disastrous premiere of The Rules of the Game in July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and Dido Freire, subsequently his second wife, to work on the script for a film version of Tosca. At the age of 45, he became a lieutenant in the French Army Film Service. He was sent back to Italy, to teach film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and resume work on Tosca. The French government hoped this cultural exchange would help maintain friendly relations with Italy, which had not yet entered the war. He abandoned the project to return to France and make himself available for military service in August 1939.
