The Crime of Monsieur Lange
| The Crime of Monsieur Lange | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Directed by | Jean Renoir |
| Produced by | André Halley des Fontaines Jean Renoir |
| Written by | Jean Castanyer Jacques Prévert Jean Renoir |
| Starring |
René Lefèvre Florelle Jules Berry Marcel Lévesque Odette Talazac Henri Guisol Maurice Baquet |
| Music by | Joseph Kosma Jean Wiener |
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Release date
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1936 |
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Running time
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80 min |
| Language | French |
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (pronounced: [mə.sjø lɑ̃ʒ]; French: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange) is a 1936 film directed by Jean Renoir about a publishing cooperative. An idyllic picture of a socialist France, the film is part social commentary and part romance.
Imbued with the spirit of the left-wing political movement, Popular Front, which would have a major political victory that year, the film chronicles the story of M. Lange (René Lefèvre), a mild-mannered clerk at a publishing company who dreams of writing Western stories. He gets his chance when Batala (Jules Berry), the salacious head of the company, fakes his own death and the abandoned workers decide to form a cooperative. They have great success with Lange's stories about the cowboy, Arizona Jim — whose stories parallel the real-life experiences of the cooperative. At the same time, Lange and his neighbor, Valentine (Florelle), fall in love.
When Batala returns from the "dead", intending to reclaim the publishing company, Lange shoots and kills him (the "crime" of the title). Lange and Valentine flee to escape the country, stopping at an inn near the Belgian border. Here, Valentine tells Lange's story to a group of the inn's patrons, who had recognized Lange as the "murderer on the run" and threatened to turn him in to the police. After the story is through, the men sympathize with Lange and decide to allow him to escape across the border to freedom.
Renoir considered the film a collaboration between himself and First Groupe Octobre. It was based on an original idea by Renoir and Jean Castanier called Sur la cour. Prevert wrote script. The shooting lasted 25 days and took place from October to November 1935, at Tréport and Paris in the studios of Billancourt. It was during the shooting of this film that Paul Éluard introduced Pablo Picasso to Dora Maar, who served as set photographer for the production.
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